The Ben Hogan name disappears—again—from the golf equipment landscape

I have some sad news for fans and aficionados of Ben Hogan golf clubs—the Ben Hogan Golf Equipment Company is no more.

Sometime around the middle of July (I learned of it on the 19th), the Ben Hogan Golf Equipment Company’s website started displaying a banner which stated that they were experiencing problems with their website and were unable to process orders.

The iconic Ben Hogan signature script logo has again
disappeared from the golf equipment landscape.

In the days that followed, the news broke that the company had closed its doors and laid off all of its employees. As it turns out, they had lost their funding partner, a company called ExWorks Capital, LLC, which was the majority shareholder and manager of the board for the Ben Hogan Golf Equipment Company. Risky investments during the pandemic, it is said, led to ExWorks ceasing to provide funding support for Ben Hogan, and in March 2022 ExWorks declared bankruptcy. The BHGEC had been in the process of expanding its offerings, including the return of a Ben Hogan golf ball, but without the funding support of ExWorks—so the story goes—the company didn’t have the capital to weather lean times between surges in equipment sales. After trying and failing to secure funding from another source, the company was shut down.

The Ben Hogan name is actually owned by Perry Ellis International (PEI), an apparel company, and was used by the BHGEC under a license agreement with them. PEI have issued a press release, hosted at the former website of the BHGEC, which states that they are seeking “a new licensee for this golf equipment product category” and that they are “exploring options for a new club manufacturing partner while exploring the current market for future opportunities.”

Call me paranoid, but to me this smacks of a business maneuver designed to slap down the existing golf equipment company, which had been flourishing under the leadership of Scott White, so that PEI could pull the manufacture of hard goods under the Ben Hogan name beneath their umbrella, and I fear that their “new club manufacturing partner” will be some Chinese knockoff shop whose cheap labor and government-supported facilities maximize profits at the expense of the design excellence and build quality that the Ben Hogan name has always stood for.

I feel lucky, now, that I decided last fall to purchase a set of the Ben Hogan Edge Ex irons that I reviewed around this time last year, and most recently, one of their excellent utility clubs, the 22˚ 4UiHi driving iron, clubs which joined my Ben Hogan GS53 Max driver and classic Sure Out 60˚ lob wedge to make my current bag 64% (9/14) Hogan clubs.

Whether the iconic sunburst and script signature logos ever return to the golf equipment landscape remains to be seen, and if they do I sincerely hope that they do so in a manner, and with equipment, that does justice to the name and legacy of one of the greatest that has ever played the game of golf.