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How to make a can’t-miss product
Burlington’s Kelly Curry started with a good idea, then followed the blueprint to golf’s next great training aid
By Ted McIntyre
Kelly Curry doesn’t strike you as the type of guy who’d want to “stick it” to the masses, but he’s poised to make a career out of it.
The gentle-natured Burlington resident has capitalized on a pair of pivotal moments in time and an inspired university program to assert himself as one of Canadian golf’s leading entrepreneurs.
Curry, who turns 40 on May 27th, is the inventor and primary marketing impetus of the Swingnature, a specially designed training aid about a broomstick in diameter and mid-iron in length that helps players increase their clubhead speed for longer and straighter shots, while simultaneously improving swing mechanics.
Inspired by an article he read prior to graduating in Civil Engineering in 1994 concerning how much business is done on the golf course, the McMaster University student took up golf and fell in love with it. Fast forward a decade.
“During the Canadian Open in 2004, I was watching Vijay Singh using his training aid, which had a weighted end,” Curry recalls. “I figured there had to be something to this apparatus if he was using it. I went to Home Depot and started putting things together.
“The original version of the product, for which I got a provisional patent, had sand in it. I capped it, taped it, painted it bright yellow and went out to the range. Within three or four weeks, the ball flight in my game started to change. I believed in the product.”
He had good reason to. Prior to using the training aid, in October 2005, Henry Brunton, one of Canada’s leading golf instructors, measured Curry’s ball speed at 135 mph. After using the Swingnature over the winter, following his own program in his garage, Curry’s ball speed was measured at 165 mph.
“The other members of Hidden Lake starting asking what’s with this stick that I had,” Curry notes. “I started to talk about it and people started to ask for one. One day a lady came to me and said she liked it, but that it was too heavy for her to swing. So with my background being engineering, I went back to the drawing board and designed one with a removable weight, not understanding the actual science behind the project at the time. By the end of 2006, I basically had what we have today, with the removable weight and interchangeable grips.”
The Masters student enrolled in McMaster’s Engineering Entrepreneurship and Innovation program and began employing the lessons he learned. “Basically, you come in with a product and they give you all the necessary skills you’ll need—business, financial and marketing planning—to help launch your project,” Curry says. “The great thing about the program is that I was also able to raise about $60,000 in government grants. Instead of starting at the zero-yard line, this started me on the 50- yard line.”
Curry also learned why his little invention was so effective. “If you go to our website (www.swingnature.com), there’s a great video clip from the Discovery Channel about the effectiveness of swinging heavy-weighted training aids before hitting golf balls. In it, Dr. Greg Rose of the Titleist Performance Institute and PGA member Dave Phillips show how Phillips lost 30 yards on his drives after a weighted warm-up. The reason is that swinging something heavy primes the wrong muscles—it primes the slow, strength muscles, whereas golf is an explosive sport. You might have the sensation of swinging something lighter and faster, but your swing speed is actually slower after using a weighted warm-up. What you need to do is swing something heavy, then swing something light, then you go hit the golf ball. Swingnature is the only product that truly addresses that routine, which is the actual physics formula for power: force times distance (strength) divided by time. With the weight in (where the club is 15 percent heavier than a standard five-iron), you work on tempo. With the weight out (where the club is 10 percent lighter than normal), you work on speed.”
Ultimately, however, players have to do the exercises correctly. To assist, Curry has incorporated visual cues—one being the Swingnature’s two-tone colour, which provides clubface orientation (if you see too much red at impact, your clubface is open; if you see too much white, your clubface is closed). It’s also 39 inches long—similar in length to a five-iron—and has a removable moulded training grip, which allows you to practise the correct position of the hands on the club.
“Then we took it one step further with the free online portal, so you don’t feel disconnected after you purchase the product,” Curry explains. “On it we have three training programs that are seven weeks in length, and will soon have video clips from Henry Brunton (one of Canada’s top ranked instructors, who employs the Swingnature at his Eagles Nest Golf Club school in Maple), Dr. Greg Wells (exercise physiologist for the RCGA) and Burlington golf pro David Banks. You can track your training and your statistics—as in business, you don’t know how well you’re doing unless you can measure your results. And it’s all free. You’ve invested in us by buying the product; now we’re going to give you the tools to help you improve with it. That’s different from what every other manufacturer does—‘Here’s the product, here are our claims, now good luck to ya!’”
The endorsement of noted local golf personalities was nice, but Curry had more ambitious marketing options. Last summer he auditioned for CBC’s Dragons’ Den, a reality series where aspiring entrepreneurs pitch their business concepts and products to a panel of Canadian business moguls. “I fell on my head,” he says. “I wasn’t used to being in front of cameras and the product wasn’t as polished as it needed to be. But it still was a great experience.”
It was CBC’s loss, and it didn’t much matter considering the momentum Curry was about to develop. An article appeared in the National Post in August, focusing on engineers and the Innovation program he was enrolled in. “They came out to the golf course to take pictures, and it turned out I was a quarter-page picture.”
That exposure led to a meeting with Golf Town, the nation’s largest golf retailing chain. “They loved the product, the experience, the internet portal, and ordered 200 units ($99.99 apiece),” Curry says. “That put the wheels in motion to finish off the marketing, get a box made and have it in stores by December 1. I have a total of 300 units in the marketplace now.”
By this point, Curry had invested nearly $100,000 into the project, including $30,000 of his own money to go along with the government grants. But it didn’t stop there. Phase two was getting the word out. Golf Town CEO Stephen Bebis suggested Curry get his product on The Golf Channel and provided him a contact number for Jim Sowerwine, creator of the popular Inside Approach training device. Sowerwine put Curry in touch with infomercial producers Script to Screen. Curry flew down to L.A. for that meeting, and flew to the PGA Merchandise Show in Orlando—the mother of all golf trade shows—to meet with media buyer CCM, Lamkin Grips, the PGA of America’s Director of Fitness David Donatucci and Nick Bradley, the noted swing coach to British PGA star Justin Rose, who has quickly become a big fan of the Swingnature.
Curry has also brought investors on board, one of whose connections include a colleague that owns the TLC Laser Eye Center for which Tiger Woods is a spokesman. “We’re going down to Arizona to see if we can get in front of Tiger. We’d sell a million units if we could get him,” says Curry, who’s also been speaking with U.S. golf retail outlets, as well as online teaching aid company Golf Around the World, which has agreed to purchase some of the product for its website.
It was right around this time that the Swingnature was selected as one of three Project of the Year winners by the Ontario Society of Engineers and Hamilton Engineering Institute.
And this all comes on the eve of the new edition’s launch—the Swingnature Smart. “The Smart grip will have sensors in it,” Curry says. “You press a button to begin your swing. That creates a ‘Go Zone,’ which is based on the lie angle of the club and creates an upper and lower limit around the swing plane. If you swing the club within the Go Zone, the club doesn’t do anything. The moment the Swingnature breaches that zone, a tone sounds. You have to learn how to swing properly on plane to prevent that. It’s immediate feedback, and it has a push-button release, which can be incorporated into the previous edition of the product.”
Curry also takes pride in his product’s local production. “Burlington’s Burloak Tool & Die is the manufacturer, and they use a painter down the street,” he says. “The ideal is to have everything made in Canada, and not have to ship anything overseas.”
Well, except for the finished product, that is. For one gets the feeling that a bevy of international orders are just an infomercial away.
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