The story behind the first-of-its-kind design

Undoubtedly, the professionals and engineers who design the new game equipment are perfectly suited to the task – and, with each new club, to bring something amazing to your game. But some gears like to go in a very different direction, because disruption is not just about breaking things. It’s about being the best.

The golf equipment industry is full of big brains and high diplomas. Ballistics PhDs from aerospace. Engine designers from automobiles. Materials scientists from advanced manufacturing. They formed a large army of eggheads, applying their expertise to a game governed by the rules of conformity and rooted in culture.

Innovation happens all the time, though not as dramatically or as often as the advertisements suggest. Golfers long for the next breakthrough. Manufacturers promise it throughout the product cycle.

But truly disturbing ideas are rare. They are not timely and cannot be put together by a marketing blitz. On the face of it, they seem to come from the outside, like a single hole, but they come from tireless effort, risk tolerance and a willingness to question what others accept as settled.

Innovators like Aretera founder Alex Dee, whose story you can read below, didn’t just contribute to web products – they challenged ideas about how gear should be designed, built and sold.

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ALEX DEE’S OFFICE it is everywhere and nowhere.

Some days, the sea. Others, it’s his bedroom. On this sunny Southern California afternoon, Dee is talking shop about Vietnamese noodles in a Carlsbad food court – a far cry from the company she’s been in for a century with one of the world’s most influential shaft builders.

Dressed in jeans and an untucked shirt, Dee, 55, gives off the air of a San Diego athlete meets a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, with the focused focus of an engineer and the comfort of a guy who lives in beach blocks. For most of his professional life, Dee worked at Fujikura’s satellite office in Carlsbad, where he helped make the company a market leader in shaft design. His fingerprints were all over the Ventus, a hard-headed shaft that dominated after making its PGA Tour debut in 2018.

Ventus was very difficult. But it also revealed a broader view of the industry, which over time, clashed with Dee’s views.

“I always felt that when people in the industry talked about increasing stability, it was accompanied by more stability,” he said. “These two are considered the same.”

Dee didn’t see it that way. In his opinion, the shaft can be both soft and precise. It is responsive and reliable. It is playable for free with accuracy. As an engineer, he believed that there is always more to learn, more ground to break. He had begun to see how success could be attributed to orthodoxy, disappointing the very research that produced it.

He wanted to keep pushing. He wasn’t sure he could do that where he was.

By then, she was watching her children navigate high school with a fearlessness that made her reconsider her choice. Dee’s son and daughter both accept risks in their social and academic lives.

“In many families, it’s the parents who are the role models for the children,” said Dee. “In my case, it was the opposite. They were both playing big swings. They inspired me to want to take one.”

In 2023, Dee left Fujikura. In theory, he had retired.

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Actually, he was waiting for the right idea. It comes from Michel de Fontaine, a longtime friend and classmate at UC San Diego who went on to work on the startup. In college, the two were more likely to be hitting beach volleyballs than sticking their noses in books. They often joked about doing something together – a coffee shop, maybe a taco stand. This time, de Fontaine was determined. They should start a shaft company.

The duo brought in two other golf industry veterans: Chris Elson to handle sales, Bill Stiles to handle customer relations. The four of them pooled their savings and founded Aretera, a name derived from a Greek place, to pursue continued success.

“I like to describe our team as three guys with about 100 years of combined experience in the industry, and one common sense person,” Dee said.

One thing they all found reasonable was not having an official headquarters. There is no room for bricks and mortar. Just four friends working towards a common goal, with no boundaries or divisions.

Dee always plays golf but never much. Even though he has more space in his system now, he spends more time on his laptop than on the links, motivated by a simple but rebellious idea: Stability and stability are not the same. To prove this, he turned to a proprietary carbon fiber and used it with extraordinary precision, pointed at an angle of 45 degrees to resist the torque and placed on the inner layers of the shaft. The rest of the shaft remains free to bend and turn. Great result. A small entry.

If that sounds like marketing speak, it’s not Dee’s song. He’s a numbers man at heart, not sensitive to unquantifiable claims.

When Aretera launched, it had no tour presence, advertising budget or endorsement deals. Just four brands and a first-of-its-kind design. That was enough. Club owners and partners welcome Aretera. Within a year, the company had released the EC1, designed for players with smooth tempos. The second line, the AO2, arrived this winter for a more aggressive makeover.