Golf Wasn't Built for Them, So They Built It Themselves

In 2021, before many companies recognized the need for junior girls’ golf apparel, Rebekah Alfond found herself searching for a laundromat in Pinehurst, North Carolina. Her young daughter had found exactly one shirt and one pair of golf shorts for that year’s junior tournament that she liked enough to wear, so every night for the length of the event, Alfond washed the clothes so they’d be ready again by morning. “This is ridiculous,” she remembers thinking.

That frustration became the founding insight behind Marie Birdie, the junior and women’s golf apparel brand Alfond runs today. It’s also, in one form or another, the founding insight behind multiple other women-founded businesses reshaping how women move through golf, like Stephanie D’Angelo’s HerClub, a professional-development company that uses the golf course to open corporate doors for women, and Kelly Okun’s Fairway to Green, an equitable media company built to tell the stories of women that bigger outlets wouldn’t.

These founders didn’t necessarily set out to become golf entrepreneurs, but each hit a wall the industry hadn’t noticed (or attempted to repair), and instead of waiting for someone else to fix it, built the solution herself.

Today, Marie Birdie has a design center and flagship store in West Palm Beach, just opened a brick-and-mortar location in Pinehurst, and international customers who plan shopping trips around apparel. Alfond’s fix started small and specific: retiring age-based sizing altogether. She’d watched her own daughters, alongside other girls on the junior circuit, get boxed in by a system that assumed every 9-year-old was built the same. Nike athlete Bella Simoes, a nationally ranked junior amateur who also works with Marie Birdie, was wearing adult sizes at age eight. Marie Birdie now uses its own sizing, aiming to let girls find their actual fits instead of the one assigned by their birthday.

The reception wasn’t universal, with some pro shops pushing back on a system that doesn’t match the size chart they know. And the payoff has been hard to fully plan for, with families from the U.K., Mexico, France and Bolivia shopping at the Pinehurst location because the apparel doesn’t exist at home. And this spring, a junior wore her own Marie Birdie skirt in a Bank of America commercial that played on a loop during Masters weekend.

“You cannot pay for this kind of advertising,” Alfond said. The brand is renewing its sponsorship of the Pine Needles junior girls’ tournament for a fourth year, one of the only brands willing to back a girls-only event in a sport still figuring out how many girls are even getting invited to play.

The Real Handicap

For Stephanie D’Angelo, the wall came nine years into a career in Big Four accounting. At an evening networking event at Deloitte, the founder of HerClub realized every person in the room could fluently speak golf, except her and one other woman. Curious rather than discouraged, D’Angelo wanted to figure out what she was missing. A partner at her firm gave her golf clubs and a single lesson, and within months her career had visibly shifted: partners including her in more conversations and doors opening that hadn’t before.

 “This is not just a health and well-being activity,” she remembers realizing. “It’s a critical professional development skill. Why aren't we empowering more women as they enter the workforce with this? Ultimately, [it’s to] get more face time, combat gender inequity and get more women into leadership.”

HerClub, the company D’Angelo built from that realization, teaches everything that happens before anyone swings a golf club. Her program, Everything Before the Swing, is a classroom session tackling the two assumptions she hears most from women: they’re not good enough, and they don’t have time.

It covers why deals get made on a course, what to wear and bring, and how to answer a question she says only men ever ask women: "What's your handicap?" ("No woman is asking another woman what her handicap is," she said. "It's never happened in the history of the world.") HerClub’s executive boot camps pair that session with private lessons and networking for 30 women or fewer, often paid for by companies bringing in clients alongside their own employees.

The client list reads like corporate America at large — insurance, banking, consulting with companies like Morgan Stanley and UnitedHealthcare, but also roofing and farming, industries she hadn't expected where golf quietly functions as currency. The door that hasn't opened easily is golf itself: clubs have shown little interest in partnering with her directly. D’Angelo gets onto courses the way she got into that first conversation — one relationship at a time.

The Only Woman in the Room

Kelly Okun, a former professional golfer turned entrepreneur, ran into her biggest professional obstacle when her work succeeded. After playing college golf at William & Mary and professionally for five years, she joined a golf marketing agency and helped build Morning Read, a golf newsletter that grew enough to catch Sports Illustrated’s attention.

SI partnered with the site editorially, and Okun used the platform to put more coverage on women's professional golfers — Epson Tour players she knew firsthand were sleeping in cars and working three jobs to afford another season. More eyes, she reasoned, meant more investment, meant more of them staying in the game. Then SI bought Morning Read outright. When Okun asked to keep running the women's coverage, she was told no — the new owners wanted to focus on betting instead.

She quit, went back to school for an MBA, and used it to launch Fairway to Green in April 2024, built specifically to keep telling the stories a bigger outlet had decided weren't worth the space. A year out of school and running it full time, she's now pushing the company further upstream, adding college-recruiting help and mental-health and financial-planning resources aimed at girls 13 to 17 — the years, she notes, when most girls quit sports altogether.

The company is still small: five regular staffers and a rotating cast of unpaid interns, most of whom, like Okun once did, are trying to break into an industry that rarely hires outside its own athletes. At tournaments, she's often still the only woman in the media center — at the NCAA women's championship, she counted three or four total reporters covering it nationally, herself the sole woman among them. She keeps a statistic close at hand to explain why that gap matters beyond the press box: 94% of women executives played sports growing up. Only two of seventeen are CEOs.

When asked about other women or new brands in the founder space, Okun was quick to share praise.

“Thankfully more women are starting to build out apparel companies — we need that. I don't think any of us have ever felt comfortable in that space,” said Okun, specifically referencing Marie Birdie, as well as Featherie, founded by competitive golfer Kate Korngold when she was just 14 years old.

The Next Wave

None of the three women set out to become "golf people." Okun still describes herself first as a media builder who chose golf; D'Angelo, more bluntly, won't call HerClub a golf business at all — to her, it's professional development that uses a golf course. But they share a pattern: each ran into a specific, unglamorous gap — a sizing chart, a networking event, a coverage decision — and built the missing piece themselves.

Increasingly, they're finding each other doing it. It’s happening in a WhatsApp group of roughly 200 women building golf businesses who trade leads and introductions, and in a separate network, Launch Break, that connects founders with athletic backgrounds across sports.

Three individual fixes are starting to look like the outline of something bigger — an industry women are no longer only entering, but building from the outside in.

“All these kids and former athletes and current athletes are taking their pain points and making something better for the next generation, and making, I think, golf more accessible,” said Okun.