How a quirky golf bag concept gave birth to a legendary name in trolleys

It started with the concept not for a trolley, but a bag. And what a concept it was.

The year was 1999, and Roy Stewart, a retired nuclear engineer, had a problem he was determined to solve. Living and golfing in the north of England, he’d had just about enough of traipsing his clubs around in the wet.

Waterproofing of golf bags was, of course, not what it is today. But what if someone came up with a solution that helped you get your clubs around in the complete dry?

A born innovator, Stewart got to work, coming up with a concept for an entirely waterproof bag that, 25 years on, seems entirely mad. Dubbed the ‘Carousel’, it held the player’s clubs with the heads at the bottom, cocooning them in a safe, dry outer shell. Roy's son Ross and grandson Mark, both engineers themselves, built the first prototypes in their home workshop.

The Carousel, of course, never made it past the prototype stage. “It didn’t work very well,” concedes Ross. However within this fantastical piece of engineering laid the shoots of a potentially radical direction in club transportation. An inverted golf bag, naturally, would need a custom trolley. Why not make it remote controlled, and more importantly, why not make it look cool?

“We quickly dropped the golf bag and we concentrated on making the trolley and that's how it started,” recalls Ross. Shortly after, the family set up shop officially, moving into a Grade II listed building in the Cotswolds which Mark says was ‘terrible for making trolleys’.

“From the original idea, we had lots of iterations in the works,” says Mark, “making things out of fibreglass and bits of metal sorts. It was probably around three years before we got anything close to being able to launch a product.

“I think to our customers, that commitment has built trust in what we do and knowing that we all care.”

2003 saw the launch of a product that would ultimately set the stage for a revolution in club transportation. Dubbed the X1-R, it was hailed by one magazine as ‘half trolley, half learjet’, with a futuristic fibreglass body. More importantly, it was remote controlled and could operate almost completely independently of the golfer.

Two decades on, and Stewart Golf, the brand born of a constant desire to innovate and to engineer, is flourishing. The Cotswolds workshop is gone, the company having moved to larger and more suitable surrounds in 2017. The Carousel prototypes are, thankfully, still around, housed in the brand’s new Gloucestershire HQ.

Likewise, Stewart Golf have continually seen their products chosen for countless industry awards, and continues to grow exponentially year-on-year year. The British brand now exports to more than 40 countries globally. Despite this, every product in Stewart’s range is designed, engineered and built in Britain, with a purpose-built American factory opened to support the brand’s expansion into the states in 2015.

More importantly, Stewart remains a company renowned for a track record of producing firsts. The F1 Lithium, designed with a rigid spine and integrated handle, was the first remote trolley to fold down small enough to fit in a compact car. In 2014, the X9, the first trolley ever to follow the golfer  without the need for manual remote input, was unveiled.

“When we set out to design products, we never wanted to be the biggest selling or have the most features or anything like that,” says Mark. “We just wanted to make products that we would want to buy and that we would look at and think they're really cool and they perform really well.

Core to Stewart’s identity is an artisan mentality that still bleeds through into every stage of the production process. Stewart remains the only trolley manufacturer that controls every stage of its build process in the United Kingdom, from design to manufacturing and final build. There’s also a consistent appetite for innovation, yet a certain restraint that means a new Stewart product only surfaces when the team decides it’s exciting enough to really revolutionise the market.

“Really, we've always set out with a goal in mind of having our products look basically a million dollars,” continues Mark. “We always joke with some of our other colleagues in the golf industry that Stewart Golf has got too many engineers and not enough marketing people where others have many marketing people and not enough engineers. To me, a new product is only a new product when there's something genuinely exciting about it.”

Stewart’s product line has evolved over the years to cater to just about every type of golfer. The X1-R evolved into the more understated, tech-forward Q Follow line that serves as Stewart’s flagship trolley today. This is supplemented by the VERTX Remote and V10 Remote ranges, offering fully remote control, bluetooth connectivity and Active Terrain Control technology.

I can say hand on heart that customers that use our products will feel the difference in the way that they experience the game,” says Mark. “So our goal ultimately is to engineer the ultimate golf experience. That's what I want customers to believe.”

You can browse the entire Stewart Golf range now at stewartgolf.com.