Mark Stewart is CEO of Stewart Golf, a company specializing in premium golf trolley innovation. Founded two decades ago in the Cotswolds, Great Britain, Stewart Golf designs and builds high-quality golf carts by hand, exporting to over 40 countries.
He holds a degree in manufacturing engineering and management from Loughborough University and is an engineer with a creative side, playing guitar and writing poetry.
Stewart, 45, is also a skier, triathlete, endurance athlete, and soccer coach to his son’s team. He lives in the Cotswolds with his wife and two children.
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What was the genesis for Stewart Golf?
My grandfather came up with an idea for a novel golf bag that held clubs ‘the right way up’ to stop the grips getting wet.
This concept never made it to market as it was ultimately too big, but it did provide the spark for us to create our electric walking carts.
We recognized that there was an opportunity for something new in that space, so got to work.
How does Stewart Golf differentiate itself from others in the same category?
All our machines have two main design priorities at their core. The first is that we focus totally on remote control and follow technologies (most start with push or ‘single motor’ and then add remote).
This focus means that we prioritize the center of gravity and balance to ensure performance when the machine is 2 yards behind or 50 yards ahead of the user.
The second is that we have a focus on aesthetics – we want our machines to be both practical and beautiful.
What are your sales via the following: 1) green grass shops, 2) online and 3) brick-and-mortar retail outlets?
In the U.S. we’re almost exclusively online. At present, the electric caddy market is still a small niche, but as it grows, I expect to see more physical stores wanting to stock the product, both from our brand and others.
Who is your customer?
Stewart owners are typically men 50 years of age and older who love to walk the golf course.
Companies routinely tout the importance of customer service. Define the term and the approach you follow.
We changed the name of the department a few years ago to ‘Customer Care’ – this was a distinction that the team members made as they feel they are there to care for our customers.
No product is 100 percent perfect and faults and mistakes happen, but the critical part is how we react as a company. We have an opportunity to turn every customer with a problem into an advocate for the brand.
Customer feedback is often a topic of interest for any company. How do you solicit such comments and what role does it play in future product creation?
It’s a balance to be struck. Henry Ford is quoted as saying, “If I asked my customers what they wanted, they’d say a faster horse!”
Customers don’t always know what they want. There is a lot of tech for tech’s sake in the world, so we won’t just follow the crowd.
Ultimately, we always focus on what will enhance the experience of walking a round of golf.
What are the biggest challenges facing the company, both short and long term?
Short term in the U.S. is navigating the turbulent landscape created by tariffs. All our machines are U.K. made, so hopefully the tariff will remain low and we won’t have to increase prices too much.
Longer term there will be new entrants to the market as walking grows in popularity across the U.S., and we will need to stay at the forefront of the industry.
What strategic steps are you implementing to deal with those challenges?
We have good U.S. stock in our Houston, Texas facility and we will continue to build and ship from the U.K. regardless. Being U.K.-made is important because most, if not all, of the other electric caddy brands are Chinese-made and therefore facing higher tariffs.
When it comes to facing future competition, we must focus on two things fundamentally: 1) continuing to innovate our product range in the direction that is most beneficial to the walking experience, and 2) telling the story of our brand in a compelling way.
If you could change one thing in golf unilaterally, what would it be and why?
I would ban the use of riding carts for anyone without a genuine medical need.
If 95 percent of U.S. golfers walked the golf course (with a Stewart machine obviously!) they would not only experience the game as it was meant to be played, they also would be healthier and probably happier as a result.
Best advice you ever received? What was it and who was it from?
My dad always told me the “the harder you work, the luckier you get” (a quote from Gary Player) but another of my favorites is from a movie called The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, where someone says, “Everything will be alright in the end, so if it is not alright, it is not yet the end.”
In other words, never give up!
Talk about a past episode in your life that helped place you on the pathway you are following now.
When Stewart Golf was in its embryonic stage, I was in college studying engineering and had designs on a career in the automotive industry. At a job interview with one of the major firms, a production engineer asked, ‘Why do you want to work in the car business?’ I gave what I thought was a good answer and the engineer replied, “What if I told you working in the car industry has nothing to do with cars?”
I came to realize what he meant. As a graduate engineer, I would be involved with making brake callipers, door handles, or engine components – it’s only the very senior people who actually get to design the whole car. At that moment, I realized that the ‘golf project’ was my opportunity to not only design ‘the car’ but also the brand and everything else that comes with a new business.
I was offered a job at Rolls Royce Motors, which I turned down in favor of building Stewart Golf.
The rest, as they say, is history!
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