TravisMathew straddles activewear and athleisure with new women’s collection

We’re hitting peak golf season for much of the United States, and TravisMathew is looking at its first summer outfitting women on the course.

The clothing brand is known for its men’s golf apparel, but in the last couple of months, it has expanded its women’s offerings, Lindsay Browder, women’s director at TravisMathew, told Retail Brew. While its first women’s line dropped last year and had more casual clothing, the company’s latest release offers a hybrid of casual- and activewear.

The company describes the new collection as “active lifestyle,” meaning not quite activewear and not quite athleisure. Browder explained that these types of offerings, which include polos, skorts, shorts, and tanks, best capture what customers want from the brand: clothing they can wear on the golf course or tennis court as well as on a casual day running errands.

• “We have roots as a golf brand, but we’ve really done such a great job of getting ourselves out of being positioned as just a golf menswear brand,” Browder said. “That’s really what our brand is about—this transitional product that takes you from life, to active, to the boardroom, to a date, to picking up kids from school.”

Tee off: TravisMathew’s first soft launch of its women’s line last year consisted of more casual apparel, so customers were clamoring for golf-oriented apparel for women, according to Browder. She added that the brand found out that 25% of its customers were in fact women already shopping the brand for their dads, brothers, significant others, etc.

• The percentage of on-course women golfers rose to 25% in 2021, a 19% increase from a decade earlier, according to the National Golf Foundation.
• The global golf clothing category was valued at $834 million in 2020 and is projected to reach $1.6 billion by 2030, with much of that growth driven by women.

Retailers including Dick’s Sporting Goods, PGA Tour Superstore, and Worldwide Golf all carry TravisMathew’s new collection, said Browder.

“We always knew that we wanted to go into golf and go into active, but we really thought it would be more like [2024, 2025], and the demand was so immediate from our customer that we were like, ‘We’re gonna get to market quicker,’” Browder said.

Looking ahead: In the fall of 2023, TravisMathew will launch in Nordstrom and aggressively grow its active lifestyle offerings, Browder said. This year, the brand plans to release one more such collection.

“What we're finding is the golf market has such a flood of new faces and a new, younger kind of energy to the game,” she said.