Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Winter Wrap-Up Microcap Rodeo Virtual Conference. The next presenting company is Sacks Parente. If you would like to ask a question during the webcast, you may do so at any point during the presentation by clicking on the Ask Question button on the left of your screen. Type your question into the box and hit the Send button to submit your question. I'd now like to turn the floor over to today's host, Mr. Greg Campbell, Executive Chairman of Sacks Parente. Sir, the floor is yours.
Thank you very much, and thank you everybody for taking the time to hear more about Sacks Parente Golf Company. Let me fast forward a couple slides here. Can everybody see the slide About Us? I hope. So, Sacks Parente is a premium performance golf company. We have a line of putters. We've just recently introduced driver shafts, and we will be, in the near future, introducing fairway shafts. We also sell very light golf grips and other, golf-related products. Recently, in April of 2022, in order to facilitate the ultra-low balance point putter, we had to develop a lightweight but yet stiff, with very good feel, graphite fiber shaft for the putters, and then that gave us the foundation to be able to develop a state-of-the-art, driver shaft, and as I mentioned, soon to be, fairway wood shafts.
We intend to manufacture everything here in the U.S., and future expansions may involve mergers, acquisitions, as well as internal developments. Just a couple notes about myself and other members of the management team. I'm a serial entrepreneur. I started my first company out of grad school, all in the areas of tech. First was semiconductors. I took that company public and then sold it to Lam Research. And then I did a satellite communications company, putting Wi-Fi on Southwest Jets, as well as other airlines, and then came to a renewable energy company, VGrid Energy, back in 2016. The reason I got excited about Sacks, and I was the first investor in Sacks Parente, was I felt that it was a real technology disruptor.
The founder, Richard Parente, was the founder of Callaway Golf, and he had always wanted to do a low balance point putter, putting all the weight in the head and getting as much weight out of the shaft and the grip as possible, in order to basically improve your tempo and allow gravity to be your friend. So I was really convinced by this technology, thought it had the chance to be another type Big Bertha, and so I jumped forward and made the first investment in the company, and I've been intimately involved ever since. We have a pretty experienced CFO, Steve Handy, and then we just brought on, last October, a real industry veteran, Scott White. He had been CEO of Ben Hogan Golf. Prior to that, he was at TaylorMade, as well as Callaway.
So he brings about 30 years of experience in the golf industry. Some investment highlights. As I just mentioned, we have a pretty accomplished management team. We have very high performance and innovative putters and Newton shafts, which we just recently introduced. And one comment that I'll make later on a follow-on slide is that these putters have been lab tested by an independent third party, and you'll see when I present that data, that they are proven to improve your putting performance. Likewise, the Newton driver shafts have been robot tested against state-of-the-art competitive shafts and have proven improved performance over competitive shafts. So we feel we've got some really differentiated products, and frankly, our challenge is that nobody really knows us yet because we haven't really launched our marketing campaigns until just recently.
But we're very excited that with these successful marketing campaigns, we'll drive rapid revenue growth. So just some key milestones here. The company was founded back in 2018. We signed our first Champions Tour player, Ken Duke, in 2019. He has won tournaments using our putters. We recently just made an announcement that he's also now playing our Newton driver shaft, as well as a three-wood shaft. And in the January event, the opening tour event, he went from sort of middle of the pack in driving accuracy to T2, tied second, and he added about 16 yards of driving distance on average over the three-day tournament.
John Daly has recently now picked up the driver shaft as well as the fairway, the three-wood shaft, and a number of other Champions Tour players are really lining up to get access to our shaft. Virtual fitting is a big thing for us. COVID forced it, but we find it to be a really valuable tool. We encourage people to sign up for a free virtual fitting, and it results in a very high conversion rate, greater than 90%, of purchasing the putter. Another key note there is we signed up a distributor, Seongok Golf , in Korea for the putters in 2022, and then just last month, we had a chance to meet with them here in the U.S.. We took them out to play some golf.
They tested our Newton driver shafts, and now they've basically placed their first stocking order and will represent Newton driver shafts and fairway wood shafts in Korea. And then in August 2023, we did a corporate IPO in order to raise the capital, frankly, to be able to up the marketing spend. So just a couple of comments about the golf industry. It's large, about $26 billion total industry size, and you can see that in 2020, due to COVID, there was a big jump up, and it seems to be sustaining. 25 million people in the U.S. play golf on a golf course, 15 million off course, either like Topgolf or driving ranges, et cetera. And a total of 41 million Americans, age 6+, are playing either on course or off course.
If you then look at the golf equipment industry, it's about $10 billion U.S., about half of that, $5 billion. An estimated 2.45 million putters are sold each year. So that's the target market for the putters, and about 3.9 million drivers are sold each year. The market for driver shafts, though, is substantially bigger than that because a lot of people, instead of purchasing a new driver, can upgrade their driver by putting a new shaft on the driver. And then just over there on the right of the slide, you see that the Korea market is a very large number two market and why we're focused on that. So let's talk a little bit about our products. There's really key technology in the putters.
I already mentioned the Ultra-Low Balance Point, but there's a couple of other key features. So the Ultra-Low Balance Point puts all the weight in the head, very light shaft, very light grip, and what that does, it induces a natural pendulum motion, which if you just take the club back and allow the shoulders to rock and the putter head to fall, gravity is your friend, and it naturally closes the club face and improves your tempo. And then in the head itself, if you notice that small metal square on the side of the mallet, we add tungsten weighting in both the toe and the heel. And what that does is it improves what's called the moment of inertia or the stiffness of the face, which improves or increases the size of the so-called sweet spot.
If you're off slightly on your putting and the ball is in dead center, it's a much more forgiving putter. Then finally, we do what's called Weight Forward Design. We try to get the center of gravity of the head as close to the face as possible, and that improves the roll of the ball. If you have weight behind the ball and you have a slightly off-center hit, you put a side spin, either a hook spin or a toe spin, on the ball, which will change the roll of the ball. Those three features are key in the putter. On the shaft, we have what's called an Elongated Bend Profile, and the easiest way to think of this is a bow.
So if you have a short bow and you pull it really, really hard, it'll have kind of a V-shaped curvature to it. And then when you release the string of the bow, it fires the arrow. So the stored energy in the bow itself connects that energy into the arrow, in this case, accelerating the arrow forward. If you think of a long bow, if you want to shoot the arrow a longer distance, it'll have a more U-shaped curve, an elongated bend. And what that does is it stores the energy over a larger volume of that bow. Well, the same thing can apply to a driver shaft or a fairway wood shaft.
So when the golfer is at the top of his backswing and he pulls down with the handle, the shaft bends, and if that bend is elongated, then as it releases close to the ball, it takes longer to release, and it's a smoother release. It's not a violent kick, which transfers energy more efficiently into the ball. So we robot-tested these shafts against state-of-the-art, competitive shafts, and we see improved dispersion in terms of the accuracy, we see increased distance, and we also see better and lower spin of the ball, as well as an improved energy transfer into the ball, a so-called smash factor. So we have a complete line of putters. Some people like blades, particularly people that like to line their ball up close to the leading edge. Other people prefer mallets if they like to line...
have a line of sight indicator behind the ball. It really, it's just up to the individual putter's taste. So we provide a variety of blades and a variety of mallets, but all with the same three elements of design I described before, the ultra-low balance point, the high moment of inertia, and the center, the weight center forward as much as possible. These are all made here in the U.S., and average ASP is about $350. So it's a premium priced product, but it's also a premium performance product. I mentioned this study that we did before, and what's really exciting about this is this was done by an independent testing lab, where they basically had 15 volunteers with handicaps ranging between eight-15.
Each golfer was given basically 82 putts with their own putter. And then 82 putts with the Sacks Parente putter. And what was really exciting was twofold. One, they made more putts with the Sacks Parente. So on average, with their own putter, they made 32 out of the 82, a 39% make rate. Whereas when they switched over to the Sacks Parente, they made 50 out of the 82, a 61% make rate. So a 56% improvement in putts made, which is pretty dramatic, because if you're a 10-handicapper and you're out on the course, that could save you about four strokes per round. The other really exciting thing is these people were geared up with the GEARS system to measure the swing itself.
And one of the keys in putting is getting your, your putter face square as it hits the ball. That makes the ball go straight. And what we saw was that the angle on average at face address, using the Sacks Parente putter, was 0.25 °. Zero would be completely square, and with their own putters, it was 2.2 °, so open, which explains why they weren't making as many putts, because their face wasn't as square at address. And then on the shaft, I already described how the technology works. We call it Distance Made Easy, but there's a couple other key things I'd like to point out. It is ready to play, so you basically go on our website, or you can go on Amazon, and you pick your swing speed.
So if you're swinging the ball, swinging your driver, 90 mph or so, or you can pick your distance that you hit it, that's a direct translation, and then you just say the type of head you have. So if you have a Callaway head or a TaylorMade head or a Ping head, you just select that, and we ship you a shaft with a grip and an adapter already on it. It arrives, you unscrew your existing shaft from your driver head, and you screw the new one on, and you're ready to go. So we call that ready to play, and it's much easier for only $250 to upgrade your driver. Most of the technology's in the shaft anyway, all the heads are fairly similar, then go out and spend $600 for a new driver.
So it's a way to upgrade your driver, prevent having to buy a new driver, and you'll find that you'll hit more fairways and you'll increase your distance. So here's our competition. We're up against the big boys, TaylorMade, Ping, Titleist, Callaway, and then on the golf shaft, on the golf shaft side, Fujikura is the leader, Mitsubishi, Graphite Design. So what do we do? We have better technology, we have better products, but we're small and not many people know about us. So the first thing we focused on was getting high quality production. So we opened a graphite fiber shaft production facility in St. Joseph, Missouri, and we've ramped up production now there, and we're producing really high-quality driver shafts, fairway wood shafts, and putter shafts. We're also moved our putter assembly operation to St.
Joe, so we're very confident about the quality and the volume and the capability of our manufacturing facility. We've expanded our product offerings, and now this is our main focus, is to grow the direct-to-consumer business. So we have a pretty large marketing budget. We're targeting a 4x ROAS or return on ad sales. So if we spend $1 million on advertising on paid social, we want to drive $4 million worth of revenue. We've just launched these campaigns recently, and we're having some really good success on the driver. The putter is a little more challenging. We're getting good traffic to the site, but we're not getting as high a conversion rate as we are with the driver.
I think the driver shaft is an easier selection, and we're working on how to guide people on which putter to pick. We're also looking at growing international sales. I mentioned Stony Golf in Korea. We're having discussions both in Japan and as well, as well as the U.K. and Europe. And then we're also in discussions with Greater Asia, China, Vietnam, Singapore, et cetera. And then you may have seen a press release. We've signed deals with Club Champion, which is the largest fitter in the U.S. They've got 130 stores, adding about eight per month. Our complete line of putters is now in all of their stores, and we just announced and have sent driver shafts to all of their stores as well.
So people can go to Club Champion. They can get fitted for a shaft, or they can get fitted for a putter. We're in discussions with two other large fitter chains, and then we just recently sent out a mass mailing to a whole bunch of independent fitters, and we're getting ready to do a marketing launch on driving virtual fitting. We signed Jim Remy, the former president of the PGA, to lead up that effort for us. So, in summary, we have an accomplished management team with proven golf industry experience. We have high performance and innovative products. We have in-house manufacturing capability. We hope to see rapid multi-year revenue growth, and as I mentioned, we're looking to do international distribution. So with that, I will click on the Q&A to see if there's any questions here.
Oh, I have a question here about: What is your strategy for the tour?
We're focused on the Champions Tour. I mentioned that Ken Duke is playing both the driver shaft and the putter. We just sponsored him, so he'll be wearing our logos on his hat. I mentioned we signed John Daly for the driver shaft and the fairway wood. We just sent 50 shafts to the tour van for an event in Florida. So there's a lot of Champions Tour players that are really interested in the shaft. And then we will be at all the Champions Tour events with launch monitor and lots of shafts to let people try those. And I'm not seeing any other questions, so I think with that, I'll hand it back to the moderator.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude the Sacks Parente Golf presentation. You may now disconnect, and the next session will begin in five minutes. Please consult the conference agenda for the next presenting company. Thank you for your participation.