Fourteen was established in 1981

by golf club designer Takamitsu Takebayashi, who felt compelled to create the ideal set of clubs because nobody else had or could. His aim was to create the best set of 14 clubs for all golfers.

Takebayashi had an illustrious career as an amateur golfer, capped by a Best Amateur Award and appearances in the 1975 Hong Kong Open and the 1977 Japan Open. His playing experience deepened his desire to use clubs to compensate for technical weaknesses. In its early days, Fourteen was a club designing company that handled club development for major manufacturers, and blazed a trail with a design methodology that converts how golf clubs feel in a golfer’s hands into quantitative data.

Figures that denote the location of the clubhead’s center of gravity are a classic example of quantifying feel. Today, it is impossible to talk about golf club performance without mentioning metrics like CG distance, CG height, CG depth, and moment of inertia, but Fourteen was the first company in the world to incorporate the science of CG into club development.

Fourteen also went beyond club development to create instruments for taking innovative, original measurements. The company’s lie and loft gauge is an essential tool for measuring specs, and even now, no professional tour van is complete without one.

Club design is about more than numbers.

No matter how well clubs perform, they are created for golfers, who as humans cannot help but rely on visual cues. Thus, a golf club’s appearance is an important element of each shot, which is why Fourteen has always maintained that clubs must be outstanding in terms of both form and function.

This basic concept of Functional Beauty lives on at Fourteen today.

1 of 3