how it all began...
I was driving to my office on a typical wet Monday morning on the M6 motorway in January of 1999. My mind racing around meetings of the day, preparations for future meetings, the politics of the corporate world and the fact that I had lost yet another club head cover!
It was a pitching wedge, so I was cursing that I would be buying yet another full set of covers, as I couldn’t buy one cover to match the others.
It led me to think – why bother with them at all? Well, as we all know, if I didn’t, I would most likely damage the heads – or rather they would damage one another!
Surely their must be another way?
Well only if you could separate the clubs so that they didn’t touch each other. Well you could do that, some bags already offered such a facility for your irons. But then again, the only time my clubs were in any particular order, was the once a year, guilt driven clean up of my bag and clubs.
I could buy such a bag, but having taken three clubs out to walk over to the back of the green to inspect my next shot, I would still drop them back into the bag in any old order – hopefully they would fit!
There must be a better way?
Why can’t the clubs fit into individual positions? And only go back into their correct place.
A flash of inspiration (or was it lightning over Manchester?), why not put them into a rotating drum or carousel and you could then simply turn the drum to the club you want?
Another humdrum battle up the motorway and my mind wanders again from my PA’s urgent message on the requirements for the buffet of our next management meeting to the rotating golf club drum – OK genius, so you’ve thought of a way of separating the clubs and allowing one to be chosen. Hardly likely to set the golfing world on fire except to some lazy golfers like me.
Tuna sandwiches on granary, finger buffet, orange juice and coffee – I’ll tell her later.
OK, what about covering the clubs up so they don’t get wet!
Good idea! Quite often I wait until its really raining before trying to fix my bag head cover on, at the speed of a new father trying to put his first pushchair up.
OK Einstein so you now have a bag that has the clubs individually separated, it rotates to the chosen club and its weatherproof – how do you get the club out?
Weeks of road works, high pressured food menu selections, staff reviews and more politics. How do you get in and out of anything? With a door of course!
Now I’m picturing my clubs in my new bag moving in and out through a door – a much better view than the hundreds of genetically engineered identical motor cars all around me.
Once you picture the clubs in this view, believe me, it became obvious that they were the WRONG WAY UP!
Attention all golfers you hold a club by the grip don’t you? So I turned them around.
Now I really think I’m up for a Nobel Prize or something of equal standing in the golfing world (probably a free bag of crisps at my local club)
I now had in my head a golf bag, enclosed from the rain, that didn’t damage clubs, allowed the correct club to be found instantly, offered it to you grip first and by a fluke, moved the centre of gravity (i.e. its weight) near to the bottom. Suddenly my engineering training of many moons ago takes over and I quickly realise that this will make the bag far easier to manoeuvre when on a trolley, and make the type of trolley needed far simpler………. KAALA was born.
A few months later ! I sketched out some ideas with my brother in law - a hands on apprentice trained engineer, and I’m pulling a wood, cardboard, steel and plastic prototype around our garden. My wife to be, thought I was crazy.
Six years later, I’ve left my corporate life, had so many late nights I can’t remember the early ones (other than those spent pouring over James Dyson’s book), had two wonderful boys, two businesses for my wife, an overgrown garden and so much worry of failing that I seriously questioned my sanity in trying to launch this product, and here it is.
This product has come from a golfer (not a good one admittedly), who wanted to do things better. Hopefully of course, my business training has taught me enough to launch and manage the business well. But it will only succeed if you find the benefits of my innovation as useful as I – I hope you do.
