Onoff wordmark in white capitals on a black square

Onoff, Fourteen and Maruman: The Boutique Houses

Between the corporate giants and the family forges sits a third group: houses that are small enough to have a point of view and well enough backed to keep it. Onoff and Fourteen belong to the same fishing-tackle parent, and make nearly opposite arguments. Maruman, through its Majesty line, sells the idea that a club can be the most expensive object in the bag. This chapter of The Atlas of Japanese Golf sets them side by side.

Onoff: the premium lifestyle

Onoff is made by Globeride, the company known until 1 October 2009 as Daiwa Seiko. Globeride’s own history runs from Yoshio Matsui’s 1955 business to the formal establishment of Daiwa Precision Works in 1958. Fishing is the majority of its sales; golf, split between Onoff and Fourteen, was 6.6 per cent of revenue in the 2017 fiscal year. In 2018 a trade profile called Onoff a fifteen-year-old company, which places its birth at around 2003.

  • Philosophy. Onoff aims at a premium lifestyle on and off the course, framed by the Japanese idea of monozukuri, the continuous improvement of product, craft and manufacture.
  • Lady is the women’s line, lighter and with more flexible shafts.
  • AKA is the distance-oriented recreational line, released in 2016 with a face technology called Power Trench.
  • Kuro is the players’ line, with forged S20C cavity-back irons. In 2018 its irons cost about $165 a club and its driver roughly $650.
  • Labospec is a limited-quantity series that is not restocked once it sells out, which is the clearest route to rarity in the brand.

The profile judged that Onoff lacks the cachet of Miura or Epon and has a smaller range than the largest domestic makers, but praised its freedom from pressure to release products on a schedule. It also warned that some Japanese brands now use parts made elsewhere, a caution that applies across this atlas.

Fourteen: the designer’s house

Fourteen began in 1981 as a design firm, founded by Takamitsu Takebayashi, that worked for larger makers. It designed several early PRGR hybrids. In 1987 Scott Simpson won the US Open with Yamaha FX-25 irons that Fourteen had designed. The Fourteen brand itself was launched in 2002, and Ernie Els is reported to have won the Open with its HI-858 driving iron soon afterwards. It is now a subsidiary of Globeride.

  • Reverse muscle. Fourteen’s signature is a design that shifts weight towards the top of the blade, raising the centre of gravity, and it sets a specific centre-of-gravity position for each loft, where some wedge makers offer low, medium or high.
  • Materials. The FH-900 irons use an S20C forged carbon-steel body, and the RM-22 wedges are forged from nickel chrome molybdenum. A 2017 review called the RM-22 as good a wedge as the reviewer had tested, while stopping short of calling it unequalled.
  • Provenance. Not every Fourteen club is made in Japan. The reviewer expected the cast clubs to be made in China or Taiwan and the forged ones possibly in Japan, and noted that some purists dismiss the brand as “JDM lite” for that reason.

For collectors, Fourteen is a wedge and specialist-iron name rather than a full-set name, and the RM-22 series, the FH-900 and FH-1000 irons and the HI-series driving irons are the models to know.

Maruman and Majesty: the most expensive clubs

Maruman is a Japanese maker whose Majesty range is its premium line. A 2007 trade announcement of its European push reported the company’s claims that its equipment had been used in more than a hundred PGA Tour wins, three of them majors, and that it introduced the first high-rebound driver and was first to bring nanotechnology to golf equipment. These are promotional claims, and should be read as such. The same announcement reported that in 2005 Forbes named Majesty the most expensive golf equipment in the world.

  • Prestigio. The flagship driver used a Fullerene composite shaft and a Nano Toughest Titanium face, and each head was finished by hand.
  • Collecting. Majesty is bought as a complete, matched set in its original finish, with the headcovers, bag and, ideally, the box.

Katana, Yamaha and the quieter names

Other Japanese names appear on the shelf from time to time, among them Katana and Yamaha, and our rooms for Katana and Yamaha gather them. The Yamaha FX-25 that Fourteen designed for Scott Simpson in 1987 is a reminder of how much of Japanese golf was made by one firm for another.

Read next: Fujikura, Graphite Design, Mitsubishi and Nippon Shaft: The Engine Room, and Why the World Buys Japanese Golf Clubs.

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Index terms: onoff golf japan · onoff kuro irons · onoff labospec · globeride daiwa golf · fourteen golf rm-22 wedges · fourteen golf reverse muscle · takamitsu takebayashi · majesty prestigio · maruman majesty most expensive golf clubs · jdm lite

References

Dates and figures in this chapter were checked against these pages. Where accounts differ, the text says so.

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