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(bright music)

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- [Narrator] In January,
2022, TaylorMade Golf Company

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announced a historic
technological innovation,

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the Carbonwoods Stealth Driver.

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The Driver took 20 years to innovate

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and promises to change
the industry forever.

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Fast Company took a sneak peek

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at TaylorMade's world headquarters
in Carlsbad, California,

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to find out why these golf
clubs are Tiger Woods approved.

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- TaylorMade thinks about
innovation a bit differently

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than most companies.

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(gentle music)

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It's a mindset.

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It's a willingness to create something new

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that either doesn't exist today

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or the opportunity to build
something that does exist

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and make it better.

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It's the hardest thing to do.

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To truly be an innovative company,

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you have to be willing to take
on risk that others won't.

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Because when you are
an innovative company,

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you succeed in certain areas

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and you have to wake up every day

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thinking that there's
a better opportunity,

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a better approach, a new idea,

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a new concept that could
further advance your cause

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or your purpose.

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And that's what defines TaylorMade.

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(light music)

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From Tiger Woods to Dustin Johnson

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to Rory McIlroy to Collin
Morikawa, all TaylorMade athletes.

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These are professional athletes

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that make their living
playing the game of golf,

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and they will not put
a product in their bag

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unless it's measurably better

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than the prior generation
product that they were playing.

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Stealth is the first product
in my 30 years of designing,

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developing, selling and
marketing golf clubs

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that went into every player's
bag at the first test session.

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That's never happened
before at our company.

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- [Narrator] The 20
year innovation process

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of TaylorMade's Stealth Driver

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was met with various issues

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because they had to build
their own technology

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from scratch without
having the option to turn

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to other industries or products.

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(playful music)

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- For hundreds of years,
drivers were made out of wood.

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And then in 1979,

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TaylorMade came along and
developed the steel wood,

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and that became the metal wood era.

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In the late 90s,

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we saw this new era in metal
woods, and that was titanium.

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So now with Stealth, we're
moving into the carbon wood era.

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Carbon composites are
a space age material.

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They've only been around
for about 50 years.

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Took us almost a decade to figure out

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how to make a perfect composite.

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We realized we needed
to protect the carbon

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'cause carbon does a lot
of things really well.

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One thing it doesn't do
well is resist abrasion.

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And we spent almost three
years trying to develop

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this new polymer, and we
knew it needed to be clear,

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it couldn't foam, it
needed to be lightweight.

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And once we found that, we're
like, "Great, we're done."

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Then we bring it up to the robot

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and we test it and it looks pretty good.

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But then we test it with wet
golf balls, and it's terrible.

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We can't hit it anywhere
with a wet golf ball.

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For somebody like me who
grew up playing in the rain,

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I grew up in Ireland.

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You know you need to hit wet golf balls.

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From then on, what we did is we focused

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on adapting this polymer cover

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and changing the roughness
pattern on the face

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so that it could handle wet golf balls.

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What we did is we added score lines,

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and we came up with this nano texture

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on the face that allows
the ball to be grabbed

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so it can launch higher with
less spin and go further.

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(gentle music)

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There are definitely plenty of times

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where there were big wins and big losses.

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As you can imagine, over
the course of 20 years,

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there was plenty of false
starts, as we call them.

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We use a golf labs robot,

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otherwise known as Iron Byron

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(playful music)

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that replicates a perfect golf swing.

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And it also allows us to dial in

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whatever kind of swing we want,

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and we can change the face
angle, the impact location,

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and we can do it repeatedly
every single time.

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So we know when we make
a tweak to our driver

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what that does to the
performance of the golf ball.

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(playful music)

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To put it in context
of the greatest golfer

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of all time, Tiger Woods.

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The robot is about four
times better than him

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at replicating consistency.

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Tiger is unbelievable,

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but the robot is a little
bit better than Tiger.

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Don't tell him I said that.

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In terms of durability and
the endurance of our product,

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we test every single day from
4:00 am to 10:00 pm at night.

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And so the Stealth Driver,

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over the last two years, has
hit over 4 1/2 million shots.

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And typically, will test
about 10 million shots

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in our lab here in
Carlsbad, in a given year.