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Tradies quit day jobs after ‘joke’ turns into $27 million empire
Dale Smedley and Shaun Trevillian had been looking for an idea that would help them quit their day jobs as tradies. Back in 2014, the plumber and glazier were in their 30s and wanted to transition to something that was a little less physically demanding.
They told Yahoo Finance that they started an Instagram page to share funny golf memes and cool videos, and the account quickly racked up tens of thousands of followers. They had been watching the e-commerce space taking off under the right circumstances and so they tested the waters with their social media followers.
“We bought 10 hats,” Smedley said.
“They were absolutely terrible and we’d probably look at them now and go, ‘What were we thinking?’
“But we’re able to sell them through our Instagram page without any website.”
The pair felt like they were onto something, so they reinvested the profit from the sales and bought 100 more hats to see if their audience was still hungry for what they had to sell.
When those hats sold faster than a pack of seagulls over a box of hot chips at the beach, Smedley and Trevillian decided to put $1,000 each into the venture.
That investment laid the groundwork for Golf Gods and they haven’t looked back since.
“It was a side business for nearly 18 months, so we were never like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to make budget this month to eat’,” Trevillian explained to Yahoo Finance.
“It was more like, ‘Well, we’ve got our jobs. we’re doing this on the side, we’ll let that organically grow and do its thing’.”
After their big hat windfall, they looked at the golf arena to see whether there was a niche they could seize.
They quickly noticed that golf can be up-tight in certain circumstances.
Some golf courses have very strict rules on what you can and can’t wear on the course and in the clubhouse and the lads saw everyone wearing the same block colours.
And that’s where they found their calling.
Golf Gods is a golfing apparel and equipment empire that did not conform to the traditional types of clothes you’d normally see on a course.
Their shirts are full of colour with cheeky names that would make you stand out during your nine or 18 holes.
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