The Moment Everything Changed
In 2014, in a garage in Reno, Nevada, a man named Bill Presse pulled the grip off a putter. It wasn’t a dramatic act. He was tinkering, the way people who build things tend to do when something nags at them. But when that grip came off and he held the bare shaft at lie angle, the angle you’d actually use over a putt, the face flopped open. Just fell right over.
This was supposed to be a face-balanced putter. The industry said so. Hold it up, balance the shaft on your finger, and sure enough, the face points at the sky. Balanced. Except Presse wasn’t putting with the shaft horizontal. Nobody is. You stand over the ball with the shaft tilted, and at that angle, gravity has other plans for the clubface. There’s torque. There’s twist. There has always been twist.
What Presse did next tells you everything. He didn’t write a white paper. He didn’t pitch investors. He grabbed a broken crutch, cut it apart, and built a prototype he called the Revealer. It was ugly. It worked. And it started a company that would eventually make the entire putter industry nervous. The Revealer holds a putter without the user touching it and shows how it twists during a stroke if not properly balanced. This tool highlighted the impact of torque on the putting stroke and inspired the development of the Lie Angle Balance technology which is the company’s hallmark.
A Bar Owner From Eugene
Presse founded Directed Force in 2015 and started selling putters built around his discovery. The company struggled. Great ideas don’t always come packaged with great business plans, and Presse was an inventor first. The putters were good, but the path from a garage in Reno to the golf mainstream is long and poorly marked.
Sam Hahn was an unlikely savior. A bar owner and musician from Eugene, Oregon, not the profile you’d expect for a future golf equipment CEO. Hahn found a Directed Force putter online, tried it, and felt what thousands of players have felt since: that unsettling moment when something you’ve been doing your whole life suddenly gets easier, and you realize you’d been fighting your equipment without knowing it.
In 2018, Hahn, his brother, and his father bought out the investors and rebranded the company as L.A.B. Golf. The name is almost bluntly literal: Lie. Angle. Balance. No clever acronym. No marketing committee. Just a description of what the putter does, as if daring you to judge it on that alone.
What the Putter Actually Does
The concept is simpler than the industry wants you to think. A L.A.B. putter produces zero torque when you hold it at lie angle. Pick it up, address the ball, and let go of the grip with one hand. The face stays square. It doesn’t twist. It just sits there, pointing where you aimed it.
Every other putter on the market has some degree of torque at lie angle. The face wants to open or close, and your hands have to manage that tendency throughout the stroke. You’ve been doing it so long you don’t notice. It’s like breathing through a slightly blocked nostril. You adapt. You compensate. You don’t realize how much effort you’re spending on a problem that could simply not exist.
For players who use a square-to-square stroke, keeping the face aimed at the target throughout rather than opening and closing it, the difference is immediate. The putter does what your hands are already trying to do. You stop fighting. You start rolling the ball on your line. The mechanics don’t change. The interference just disappears. Just hold the putter loosely and let it swing.
That said, this isn’t for everyone, and the company would probably admit that. Players with an arcing stroke, the kind of motion that naturally opens and closes the face, may not feel the same benefit. Some fitters will tell you that torque isn’t inherently bad, that a well-fit conventional putter matched to your stroke can perform just as well. And they’re not wrong. Putting is deeply personal. What L.A.B. did was identify a variable nobody was talking about and eliminate it. Whether that variable matters to you depends on how you move the putter.
From Garage to Oakmont
Adam Scott was one of the first tour players to take notice. He gamed a DF2.1 at the 2019 Masters, and the golf world paid a certain kind of attention, the kind where people say “interesting” and keep watching. Then in 2020, Peter Finch and Rick Shiels reviewed L.A.B. putters on YouTube, and the business tripled overnight. Not over a quarter. Overnight.
That’s the strange math of modern golf equipment. A well-struck seven iron doesn’t care about social media, but the people buying the clubs absolutely do. Those YouTube reviews did what years of grassroots demo days couldn’t. They put the putter in front of millions of eyes, and enough of those eyes belonged to people who’d been searching for something they couldn’t name.
Today, tour players across the PGA Tour, DP World Tour, and other professional circuits game L.A.B. putters. Not one of them is paid to do so. Zero endorsement deals. They play the putter because it works, and they keep playing it because nothing else feels the same once you’ve made the switch.
Then came Oakmont. The 2025 U.S. Open, final round, 18th green. JJ Spaun stood 64 feet from the hole with a one-shot lead and a DF3 in his hands. Oakmont’s greens are among the fastest and most terrifying surfaces in championship golf. Sixty-four feet across that glass, with a national title hanging on it. He committed to the line, made the stroke, and the ball tracked the full length of the green and dropped. Walk-off birdie. The broadcast booth went silent for a full beat before the call caught up to what had just happened. If L.A.B. Golf needed a moment that made people stop scrolling, that was it.
The numbers since 2018 are almost hard to believe. Eighteen thousand percent growth. From four employees to 225. From a rebranded garage startup to the putter company that the entire industry is watching.
Steel Inserts and the Current Lineup
The newest chapter in the L.A.B. story is steel. The OZ.1i, their collaboration with Adam Scott, has a steel insert face and offers a 0-degree shaft lean option that Scott himself helped develop. It’s a mallet with presence on the green, and the steel insert gives it a feel that’s firmer, more connected. You hear the ball leave the face differently. There’s feedback there that the original aluminum face and other putters’ polymer inserts can’t quite deliver.
The OZ.1i HS might be the release that matters most for growing the brand. It’s their first heel-shafted model. If you’ve ever looked at a L.A.B. putter and thought “I love the tech but I can’t get past the shaft position,” this is the answer. Traditional setup. Classic sight lines. Same zero torque. It looks like any other premium mallet until you pick it up and feel it refuse to twist in your hands.
The DF3i, released in February 2026, is the latest refinement of their original Directed Force shape. Firmer feel from the steel insert, 2% faster ball speed than the previous model. For players who prefer the DF’s more compact profile over the OZ mallet, it’s the best version they’ve made. The MEZZ.1 MAX and the LINK.1 blade fill out the range with mid-mallet and blade options. The full lineup runs $499 to $599 for stock offerings, but customization with upgraded shafts and lengths can add another $500, which isn’t cheap, but feels honest for what you’re getting. After all, the putter is the most used club in your bag. Save some coin on that $600 driver and invest in the club that will impact your score the most.
Fanboy Status: 10 Putters and Counting
I should be upfront about something, because you’ve probably already picked up on it: I’m a fanboy. I’ve owned ten L.A.B. putters. I currently have five of them. An OZ.1i Sweeper for when I get desperate, a 38-inch counterbalanced OZ.1i that I built for a specific purpose and can’t bring myself to sell, Two OZ.1i HS models, because when the “blackout” special edition face and screws were released, I couldn’t resist. Finally, a nearly 4 year old MEZZ Max, which feels like forever ago at this point. That’s not rational consumer behavior. I know that.
I came to L.A.B. in the earlier days, before the YouTube explosion, before JJ Spaun, before most people had heard the name. I try to putt with a square-to-square stroke, and the first time I set up over a L.A.B. DF2.1, I felt what Presse must have felt in that garage. Not a revelation, exactly. More like recognition. Like the putter was doing what I’d been trying to force every other putter to do for twenty years. It probably helps that I’ve always had an affinity for “ugly” putters.
For those that prefer a traditional look, that’s what’s tough about these putters. They look strange. The early models especially. You set one down behind the ball and your playing partners stare at it like you pulled a kitchen utensil out of your bag. The shaft position on the center-shafted models takes getting used to, visually and mechanically. I’ve had friends try mine, make six putts in a row, and still say “I just can’t get past how it looks.” That’s real, and I’m sure it’s cost L.A.B. some sales over the years. The OZ.1i HS exists specifically because the company heard that objection enough times to do something about it without deviating from their core mission of making Lie Angle Balanced putters.
What keeps me in the ecosystem, beyond the performance, is the community. The “LAB Rats” Facebook group has over 37,000 members, and it has an energy I haven’t seen anywhere else in golf equipment circles. People share setups, contemplate grip changes, debate shaft lengths, and post their rounds with the earnestness of hobbyists who genuinely love what they’ve found. Sam Hahn himself is in there regularly, responding to questions, taking feedback, occasionally getting roasted for shipping delays. It still feels like a mom-and-pop operation, even as the company has scaled beyond anything its founders probably imagined.
What Comes Next
In July 2025, L Catterton, the private equity firm backed by LVMH, acquired a majority stake in L.A.B. Golf. The valuation reportedly exceeded $200 million. That makes it perhaps the largest putter acquisition since Callaway bought Odyssey in 1997.
The Odyssey comparison is worth mentioning, because when Callaway acquired them Odyssey was a niche innovator with a cult following built on the 2-Ball and the Rossie. Under Callaway, they got global distribution, tour staff deals, and shelf space in every pro shop on the planet. They also became, gradually, a corporate putter brand. The quirky identity softened. The product line ballooned. They’re still the most-played putter on the PGA Tour most weeks, but nobody talks about Odyssey the way they talk about L.A.B. Nobody posts in an Odyssey Facebook group about how a mallet changed their relationship with the game.
That’s the tension. The management team stays, and that was a condition of the deal. Sam Hahn and the people who built the culture remain in place. L Catterton brings international distribution, retail partnerships, and R&D capital. On paper, the soul stays and the resources multiply. But private equity doesn’t acquire companies at nine-figure valuations to leave them alone. There will be pressure to grow faster, expand the line, chase market share. The question is whether L.A.B. can do that without becoming the thing it defined itself against.
I keep thinking about Bill Presse in that garage, pulling the grip off a putter because something didn’t feel right. I think about Sam Hahn finding a weird putter online and convincing his family to go all in. Those are small, human moments you don’t often hear about with other brands’ origin stories.
I have nine putters that say the idea at the center of this company is strong enough to outlast the growing pains. Some things, once you feel them, you can’t unfeel. The face stays square. You stop fighting. And you roll the ball where you’re looking.
