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Sonartec: Demise of a dream


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By ADAM SCHUPAK

Senior Writer

 

It was the defining moment for a golfer's career and an upstart equipment company. Todd Hamilton, a 38-year-old journeyman pro, was 40 yards short of the cup on the final hole of a playoff with Ernie Els in the 2004 British Open at Royal Troon. Remember the crusty lie?

 

Hamilton summoned his 17-degree Sonartec Md hybrid, the one bent to 14 degrees, the same club he had used religiously all day, off the tee, out of the rough – even for chipping around the greens. He bumped the ball to tap-in range for an improbable victory.

 

“It's not a shot I practiced,” Hamilton says.

 

It also was unexpected exposure that cash-poor Sonartec never could have afforded to buy – the equivalent of a free, four-hour infomercial for the little-known clubmaker. Employees raced to the office eager to assemble clubs and prepare for what they hoped would be an onslaught of orders. They were greeted with 15 phone lines crashing for more than 30 minutes and an inbox jammed with more than 5,000 e-mails. Hamilton's memorable shot placed Sonartec on the cusp of commercial success. But without the resources of larger brands, management failed to capitalize on its grand opportunity.

 

It didn't seize leadership of the burgeoning hybrid category. A series of other missteps hindered the company even more. Rather than becoming the hit it seemed destined to be, Sonartec – almost inconceivably – has halted operation. Just last week, Golfweek reported the company's Carlsbad, Calif., headquarters had been shuttered. All of its employees are gone. And its new owner packed up and moved the remaining assets of Sonartec up the road to La Quinta.

 

With its future in limbo, one question begs answering: What happened?

 

The company's fortunes are suspended between two men. Sonartec co-founder Toru Kamatari – who helped launch the businesses of puttermakers Scotty Cameron and Bob Bettinardi in Japan – had dreams of building his own company in the U.S. He thought he had found a financial savior in Peter Pocklington, who owned hockey's Edmonton Oilers during their Stanley Cup dynasty in the 1980s.

 

Pocklington envisioned investing in a company he thought would be a surefire winner. But their partnership has deteriorated into a bitter dispute that now is mired in court. The downfall of Sonartec is intertwined in their stories.

 

Toru Kamatari has a roundish face, soft eyes and an easy smile. Those who know him agree he could pass for a much younger man. But the 43-year-old breaks the stereotypical mold of the unadventurous, conforming Japanese businessman.

 

Kamatari loves movies. As a youngster living in Japan, he disobeyed his parents, staying up past his bedtime to watch American classics such as “Jaws” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” His hero, no surprise, is Steven Spielberg. Says Kamatari: “The movies made me want to come to America.”

 

He immigrated to Hawaii when he was 18 to attend Kansai Gaidai College and pursue the American dream. It's a story he proudly shares in his overarticulated English.

 

“In Japan, it's very difficult to be an entrepreneur. Most people work for a large corporation, live in a small apartment and drive a Toyota Corolla. That's it until you retire,” Kamatari says. “It's a safe life, but not for me. I wanted to challenge myself.”

 

His career in golf began unexpectedly. In the late 1980s, the realty company Kamatari worked for in Hawaii asked him to manage its golf shop, A Piece of Time, even though he never had played a hole.

 

To learn the game, Kamatari smacked range balls after work and read golf magazines every night. He learned more than just how to play. He developed a shrewd eye for market trends. “Toru understands where the market is going and how to be there before anyone else,” says Cameron, who's known Kamatari for 20 years.

 

The first time they met, Cameron, then an inside sales representative for Ray Cook putters, was on his honeymoon and made a detour to A Piece of Time. When Cameron got home, he sent samples of handcrafted putters he wanted to make to the store. Impressed, Kamatari encouraged management to negotiate a five-year deal for the exclusive rights to sell Cameron's putters in Japan and Hawaii.

 

Kamatari had a hunch demand existed for the putters, and he was right. Soon, Japanese clientele who didn't mind paying for the best were shelling out upward of $1,000 per club. “We were these underground entrepreneurs,” Cameron recalls. “A bunch of hardworking, hustling guys.”

 

Though Kamatari's passion has been putters – he later had similar success as a distributor for Bob Bettinardi – it was a fairway wood that next captured his interest. In 1995, he played golf with a Japanese friend who carried a Royal Collection fairway wood, which had a sole featuring a distinctive U-shaped chamber called a driving cavity. “It was the most beautiful metal club I had ever seen,” Kamatari says.

 

In 1998, he met Hidetsugu “J.J.” Koyama, Royal Collection's vice president, at the Japan Golf Tour's Bridgestone Open and struck up a friendship that led to an unexpected offer a year later: A chance to license Royal Collection's patented technology to make and sell driving cavity clubs for markets outside Asia. For Kamatari, it was the proverbial opportunity of a lifetime. Together with Yoshinari Kemmi, Royal Collection's president and chief designer, and Koyama, Kamatari founded Sonartec in December 1999 with a $100,000 total investment.

 

Kamatari knew he had a product pros would play. At the time, Royal Collection fairway woods were among the most popular on the Japanese circuit, and Sonartec clubs were essentially twins – with heavier sole plates to better fit American golfers. The driving cavity placed the center of gravity higher and deeper in the clubhead for an expanded sweet spot and more penetrating ball flight preferred by pros. Comprehensive endorsement deals had yet to become the norm, giving Kamatari a chance to get his clubs into the hands of Tour players.

 

And try it they did. Three-time major winner Nick Price gave Sonartec a big boost when he put the fairway woods in his bag.

 

“He was playing a practice round in Japan with Kaname Yokoo, and Kaname kept hitting our 3-wood past Nick's driver,” Kamatari remembers. Price, a noted club junkie, had to try it. A few weeks later, Price joined Sonartec as a minority owner and adviser.

 

The company achieved another milestone when its fairway woods were used by both players in the final pairing of the 2001 British Open. When David Duval won, Sonartec earned its first major championship victory and extensive TV exposure.

 

Beginning in 2000, sales doubled every year for four years. At its peak in 2005, the company surpassed $8 million and sold products at 3,900 retail locations worldwide. Its clubs were beloved by better players.

 

“In 12 years in the fitting business, I can't remember a guy coming in with a Sonartec fairway wood that was a good fit for him and saying, ‘I need to upgrade this. I want to change my fairway wood,' ” says former U.S. Amateur champion Mitch Voges, co-founder of Max Out Golf Labs, a custom clubfitter north of Los Angeles. “I can't say that about any other product.”

 

The company moved to larger quarters in the industry's capital of Carlsbad, Calif., where Kamatari's entrepreneurial spirit chased an additional venture: Trion:Z, a negative-ion performance bracelet. Last spring, Trion:Z moved its operations into a suite adjoining Sonartec offices – only an open doorway separating the two. As Kamatari's businesses prospered, he treated himself to not one, but two Mercedes sports cars – a silver CL500 coupe and a black E550 sedan. He was living the American Dream.

 

But when demand surged for its hybrids following Hamilton's victory, Sonartec, like many startups, was ill-equipped to respond. Graphite shortages, headcover delays and assembly setbacks disrupted operations all too frequently.

 

“We were putting Band-Aids on bullet wounds,” says Erik Boysen, Sonartec's former marketing manager.

 

Sonartec's defining moment ultimately triggered its downfall. For all their acclaim, Sonartec clubs never hit that critical threshold to become mainstream. That failure has been duly noted: Unit sales market share at on- and off-course retailers never eclipsed 1 percent, according to research firm Golf Datatech. (By January, Sonartec sales had fallen to such levels that Golf Datatech stopped tracking the brand individually and lumped the company into the “others” category.) Sonartec's last profitable year came in 2004.

 

“When you have a phenomenon like a Todd Hamilton win, are you really in position to take advantage of that?” asks TaylorMade executive Sean Toulon, who experienced the challenges of a startup company with Zevo Golf. “You need all kinds of things to fall in place to make it in a hypercompetitive marketplace.”

 

For a small company, one hiccup can be fatal. Sonartec had several.

 

The company initially was ahead of the hybrid craze, but others quickly answered. TaylorMade and Cobra assumed control of the category. Nickent tabbed itself the “King of Hybrids” and linked itself to the Nationwide Tour, and Adams Golf grabbed market share by introducing mixed club sets containing conventional irons and hybrids.

 

Sonartec's most glaring mistake, perhaps, amounted to one bad call.

 

Following its banner 2004, the company's forecast anticipated sales of hybrids quadrupling and fairway woods increasing 50 percent. But some Sonartec executives thought the hybrid boom would attract stiffer competition, and fearing inventory buildup, decided to manufacture only half the projected number of Md clubs. And they doubled the fairway-wood forecast, expecting their new model would be a hit.

 

They guessed wrong on both counts. The trend of golfers' swapping long irons for easier-to-hit hybrids intensified, leaving Sonartec short on Mds. Meanwhile, Sonartec failed to provide custom-shaft upgrades for its new fairway wood; it lost sales and soured loyal consumers. Says Voges about Sonartec: “They blew what looked like a rocket ship.”

 

And as competitors shortened their product life cycles, churning out new models to entice golfers, Sonartec failed or refused to keep pace. The Md, for example, is more than 4 years old. During a period of two years, Royal Collection sent Sonartec five iterations of Md replacements, but Kamatari rejected all of them.

 

“I was very stubborn about quality and performance,” he says.

 

Kamatari decided he couldn't rely on Royal Collection to provide new models for the U.S. market. By late 2005, he assembled an in-house R&D team to work in tandem with a Chinese foundry. They produced the company's first wedges and a hybrid for higher handicaps. In the process, Kamatari came across a forged-face technology that he thought could yield next-generation fairway woods and drivers.

 

In November 2006, he phoned the owner of the patents, who invited him to a meeting to discuss licensing the technology. What Kamatari didn't know as he drove to Indian Wells, Calif., was that the man who seemed in so many ways to be a perfect partner would oust him from the company he built.

 

Peter Pocklington, 66, is the son of an insurance executive from London, Ontario, who bought his first piece of real estate, a 16-unit building, shortly after he dropped out of high school. He leveraged his real-estate profits into several Ford dealerships, becoming the largest Ford dealer in Canada. Pocklington says he became a millionaire at 21. Pocklington has bought and sold more than 50 businesses, parlaying a wide-range of ventures – from meatpacking to sports franchises – into a fortune.

 

But the drive that makes one enough money to retire in his early 30s rarely allows one to sit tight and enjoy it. Pocklington says he acquired a stake in the Edmonton Oilers in exchange for a vintage Rolls Royce Phaeton used in the film “The Great Gatsby,” a painting by Maurice Utrillo and a diamond ring that happened to be on his wife's finger.

 

He signed Wayne Gretzky to an unprecedented 21-year personal-services contract when “The Great One” turned 18. When Gretzky led the Oilers to four of its five Stanley Cups, Pocklington became a national hero.

 

But Pocklington's empire began to crumble in the late 1980s. He traded Gretzky to the Los Angeles Kings in 1988, a deal that many speculated was spurred by Pocklington's need for millions in cash. (Irate fans burned the owner in effigy for the act.)

 

In 1998, Alberta Treasury Branches forced Pocklington to sell the NHL club to pay off his accumulated debt. According to published reports, the next year, the bank seized other assets, including a margarine factory, a corporate jet, dozens of valuable paintings and a wine collection valued at an estimated $700,000.

 

Pocklington moved to California in 1998. In his retirement, Pocklington says he has “dibble dabbled” in a number of small businesses and has acquired GolfGear International Inc., which at one time marketed and sold golf equipment, such as the Tsunami driver. GolfGear owns 10 patents and licenses technology to equipment manufacturers, including Nike.

 

In many ways, Pocklington and Kamatari needed each other. For Kamatari, Pocklington represented much-needed cash to fuel Sonartec's expansion. For Pocklington, still reeling from his business failures, Sonartec marked a chance for redemption. “Peter would love to be able to point to one more home run,” says Dan Wright, GolfGear's former CEO.

 

Kamatari and Pocklington negotiated for months, reaching an agreement on March 27, 2007, under which a new entity – Sonartec International LLC – would receive all of the issued and outstanding shares and stock options in Sonartec. As part of the deal, court documents show, Kamatari agreed to serve as president of the company signing a two-year contract at an annual salary of $180,000.

 

His staff would remain intact. When the deal closed May 30, Sonartec employees, Pocklington and investor Dick Shillington celebrated at West Steak, Seafood & Spirits in Carlsbad. It was the last act of goodwill among them.

 

According to the suit Kamatari and shareholders filed against Pocklington Feb. 13, Pocklington breached the agreement in part by failing to provide the cash resources he promised Sonartec.

 

Pocklington denies the allegations and counters that once he gained control of the company, he uncovered $500,000 in liabilities that hadn't been disclosed. The relationship came to a head Aug. 17 when Pocklington confronted Kamatari in his office and fired him. Kamatari left carrying files, family photos and other personal mementos. His refuge became the adjacent offices of Trion:Z.

 

Soon after, the separation was underscored. A contractor drywalled what once was the open doorway between the two companies.

 

Sonartec exhibited at the PGA Merchandise Show in January and showed off its new Tri-brid line behind a 10-foot-by-20-foot booth – the exact size the company rented when it made its debut in 2000. Several retailers and industry executives who stumbled upon it say the booth was a sad testament of Sonartec's fall.

 

Pocklington says he can't attract investors until the dispute is resolved. But he still harbors ambitions of filming a Sonartec infomercial one day. Meanwhile, Kamatari is resolved to somehow reclaim and rebuild the company he founded. Although he is now the CEO of Trion:Z, his allegiance to Sonartec is evident.

 

“We worked so hard,” he says, refusing to let go.

 

Unlike many of those American movies Kamatari grew up watching, his story may not have a perfect Hollywood ending.

 

Deal designed to save Sonartec unravels into courtroom feud

 

 

 

 

FULL ARTICLE

#TruthDigest
 

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Thanks for the article. It's always interesting for someone like me to get a small glimpse into the inner workings of the golf business. It's unfortunate that the business relationship turned nasty, and that now the original CEO is left trying to find a way back in.

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Thanks for the article. I had always wondered what had happened at Golf Gear Inc.I really loved those Tsunami drivers in fact I still have 2 of them.

Driver ---- Callaway Big Bertha Alpha  Speeder 565 R flex- 5W TM V-Steel Fubuki 60r--- 7W TM V-Steel UST Pro Force Gold 65R----- 9 W TM V Steel TM MAS stiff---- Irons 2015 TM TP CB Steel Fiber 95 R--- GW Callaway Mack Daddy 2 52* shaft unknown junk pile refugee. SW Callaway PM Grind 56*  Modified sole grind--- KBS Tour Wedge-- LW Vokey 58* SM5 L grind--- Putter Ping B90I Broom Stick 

 

 

 G

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  • 2 weeks later...

I have a Sonertec no 2 Md hybrid, great club feels very solid.

Thanks for article I enjoyed reading it. Bye the way another company that was quite strong albeit in the '80s was Sounder, what happened with them?

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  • 3 years later...

I'm digging up this thread because I just purchased a set of Sonartec T46 EAST wedges. I don't know that I necessarily needed new wedges (well... old stock but they are new condition ;) ), but they're so purdy and were an absolute steal ($110 for the set). Non-conforming, but heck I think I'll have worn them out by the time I'm ready for tournament golf so I couldn't care in the slightest.

 

sonartec1.jpg

 

52-10 , 56-14 , 60-12. True Temper XP95 S300 shafts. They have a some heel-toe relief, and the turf is reasonably soft here in Hawaii so I'm not overly worried about the high(ish) bounce. I have to remember that "Bounce is your friend"...

 

These just came out of the plastic so no comments on performance yet - would be interested if anyone ever played these or the earlier T35 version of the wedges?

 

sonartec2.jpg

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I actually just got done speaking with Toru, so I am glad to see this thread again and that you got a set of the wedges.  

 

I always loved the look of these.

#TruthDigest
 

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Very nice......

Driver: image.png.6ba1c8a254ad57aa05e527b74c2e04ba.png0311 XF 10.5* w/Project X Cypher 40 gram Senior shaft or 0811 XF 12* w/Evenflo Riptide CB Senior shaft

Fairways:  image.png.80321f01fc46450b6f428c7daf7b3471.png0211 5W & 7W w/ Evenflo Riptide CB  regular shaft and Tour Edge E521 9W w/Fubuki HD50 regular shaft

Hybrid: None in bag at the moment

IronsTitleist T300 5-PW w/Fubuki MV Senior graphite shafts w/Golf Pride Tour

Wedges: Edison forged 49*, 53* and 57* wedges with KB PGI Senior shafts(80 grm).

Putter: 33” Evnroll ER6R or  ER2 or Bellum Winmore Model 707,   or Nike Method Core Drone  w/Evnroll Gravity Grip

Bag: Vice cart bag(Black/Lime). 

Ball: Snell MTB Prime X, Maxfli Tour/S/X CG, Titleist Pro V1x or Titleist TruFeel

Using Shot Scope X5 and Pinned Rangefinder

 

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I played these wedges. Spin is unbelievable. Not that soft a feel compared to my Callaway X Tours at the time. IIRC these were 8620 steel? So probably form forged.

 

I did find the leading edges tended to dig when the turf was wet.

 

Just realized I had the T35s

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Played them off and on since they came out. Just sold my used ones this past fall. I do, however, have a NIW set in the box here. Fine wedges to say the least.

 

I'd be willing to part with em. If anybody is interest, PM or email me.

 

009_zpsf1b6d04c.jpgIMG_3640Medium.jpgIMG_3633Medium.jpgIMG_3641Medium.jpg

COBRA KING LTD Matrix Ozik HD6

ADAMS Super S 3w & 5w Matrix Radix HD S VI

CLEVELAND GlideRail 20.5* Kuro Kage 80i

CALLAWAY Apex Forged 5-PW UST Recoil 680

INNOVEX Type S GDT 50* & 54* Kuro Kage 80i

ODYSSEY Tri-ball SRT 34"

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