THE VEE TEE

Just been tweeted saying he's found a pack of tees in his garage that he bought 13 years ago. The Vee Tee was one of the first products I designed. They were featured in Stuff magazine and Conde Nast Traveller. Reviewed by European Tour player Alison Nicholas who thought they were rubbish. But they were not designed to improve your game, they were super-tough and more of a blatant style statement. I remember looking at Philippe Starck designs at the time. Made in England, just up the road by an injection moulding company in Onley, from high grade zytel.

Silver foil pouch packaging with info. label. Six tees per pack available in black and orange.
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CAREER LOANS FOR TOP AMATEUR GOLFERS?

When you decide to turn pro you probably need about 20-25k to go on tour. There was a very good example recently when the current female British amateur champion received an invite to play on the LPGA's first major. Unfortunately she nor her family could afford the airfare and accommodation. There is an opportunity for golfing bodies to take a stake in their most promising young amateur golfers by offering a loan system to turn pro, where the money is paid back with interest if they succeed.

In the UK you can take out a student loan to cover your university fees etc, which enables students from all backgrounds to attend university. When they graduate and start earning a salary above a stated threshold, they then start to pay the money back plus interest to the government. Sports coaching and training costs a small fortune. Where does the money come from if not from your parents / family and friends? Could a similar loan system work for new professional golfers?
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WILL ADIDAS STAY SILENT?

I've just acquired a brand new Adidas sports shirt in black with orange flashes. Had a quick butchers at the label which states 'made in China' and '100% polyester'.Just e-mailed Adidas to ask if their textile workers were paid a living wage to make my shirt? Plus could they confirm this sport shirt, designed to interact with my sweating skin, contains lead, mercury and cadmium? Obviously a full list of the chemicals used would be ideal. Will be interesting to see what Adidas say.
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RESPONSIBLE PRODUCTS

According to a report by the Congressional Research Service, 85.9 million metric tons of textiles were produced in 2011. China dominates the production of textiles, accounting for 63 percent of global output, followed by India and the United States. Globalized and outsourced textile manufacturing is a major cause of water pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and exploitative labour practices.

Designers are urged to stop buying material from manufacturers who aren’t taking steps to reduce their environmental impact, but they can’t do it by themselves. A lot of the fabric makers don’t feel it’s commercially feasible to create responsible products.
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CALLING 3D PRINTING EXPERTS

Sports products are highly regulated and golf balls are no exception. However, the dimpled cover for a golf ball is unrestricted in terms of the shape, size, depth and quantity of dimples per ball. Golf ball covers are usually injection moulded using thermoplastic materials; eg DuPont's Surlyn. If it were possible to 3D Print a golf ball cover over a synthetic rubber core using an appropriate thermoplastic. It would open the door for every golfer to design and manufacture their own golf balls. As golf balls have a relatively small diameter and cover thickness minimal, the amount of material used and hence cost should be reasonable.

Please get in touch if you think you can 3D Print a golf ball cover in a single piece over a synthetic rubber core. You might just start a revolution.

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JUST TELL US

Textiles are full of chemicals, an undisputed fact. Chemicals are treated and regulated on an individual basis, and yet when two or more substances combine, their toxicity can be fundamentally changed. Here is just one example;

A dose of mercury that would kill 1 out of 100 rats, mixed with a dose of lead that would kill 1 out of 1000 rats, would kill every rat exposed.

You may think that your sportswear wouldn’t contain such toxic substances such as mercury and lead, but you would be wrong. They do, it’s just that the brands do not inform consumers about any of the chemicals they use to make your clothes. We previously published a list of restricted substances from a leading sportswear brand.

And none of these chemical cocktails are tested, unless you consider yourself as a guinea pig.

You may think that such chemicals are only used in very low doses and you would be correct. We used to think that a little dose of a poison would do a little bit of harm, and a big dose would do a lot of harm. But the new science shows that exposure to even tiny amounts of chemicals can have significant impacts on our health.

We are exposed to chemicals all day, every day in a multitude of consumer products. This cumulative exposure could mean at some point your body reaches a tipping point. The generations born from 1970 on are the first to be raised in a truly toxified world.

What should we do? As consumers we should demand brands provide a list of all the chemicals they use in the finished products they supply to us.

Regulators should begin to test mixtures of chemicals and provide additional information and regulations to limit the use of the most harmful combinations.

The chemicals used in textiles are real. Given the amount of time we spend surrounded by fabrics they contribute towards the hazardous challenges to our bodies.

We deserve to know what chemicals we’re eating, drinking and putting on our skins. Just tell us.

Ref: Oecotextiles
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LOWER BALL TRAJECTORY

Because of its unique lattice cover design, Golf Refugees ball will have deeper dimples than traditional solid covered balls, which in theory should produce a lower ball trajectory.
We are talking with The Royal College of Art to create initial 3D Printed lattice cover prototypes.
This colour combination was inspired by Matisse; blue core with light blur number 3 and yellow lattice cover.

#golfrefugees #latticecover #golfball
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NEW GOLF BALL DESIGN

Proposed new ball design by Golf Refugees using a 3D Printed (or moulded) 'lattice' ridges only dimpled cover in yellow over a black core with a red number 3.
#golfrefugees #latticecover #blackgolfball
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3D PRINTED LATTICE GOLF BALL COVER

What would happen instead of moulding a typical solid white dimpled cover over a golf ball core, you 3D Printed just the ridges of the dimples to create a ‘lattice’ cover which allowed the core to be visible through the structure?

This picture depicts a black colour core with a proposed 3D Printed white dimpled ridges only cover by Golf Refugees. Also shown is a yellow printed number ‘3’, which would have to be printed onto the core and be partially obscured when the lattice cover is applied.

How would this golf ball perform with this type of cover? Would the cover which uses considerably less material be strong enough to withstand repeated impacts? How would the distance and trajectory be affected?

I guess there's only one way to find out.
#golfrefugees #latticecover #blackgolfball
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DIGITAL LABEL

We’re increasingly living in a digital world where millions of images are uploaded and shared across multiple platforms every day. Reading in The Guardian today there are over 455 eco-labels across industry categories from energy, food to clothing and household cleaners. Understandably is it confusing for consumers and yet there is no ‘sweatshop’ label where most of our clothing is made. To be helpful we have created a digital sweatshop badge for you to use and enhance any picture of your favourite sport star that are paid handsomely to wear and promote apparel manufactured in this appalling way.
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THE SHALLOWNESS OF DRESS CODES

Good article in the Telegraph describing the slipping dress standards of spectators at Wimbledon and at the same time applauding the enforcement of the strict white dress code for players. Now, I don’t have a problem with an ‘all white’ look, though for me wearing white knickers on show in a highly stressful environment may not be the most practical colour. However, my main gripe is the shear shallowness of todays and yesterdays definition of a ‘dress code’. At Wimbledon it only matters that players wear white, even when their white sportswear is made in Asian sweatshops, where young female textile workers are treated appallingly in terms of pay and conditions. It also doesn't matter if the white sports apparel is manufactured in the most polluting manner as long as in the end it still looks white. What kind of a dress code is that?

Let’s have a new dress code defined for the 21 st Century, which takes into consideration how the apparel is made.

As for spectators at Wimbledon, personally I’d rather wear a natural fibre, ethically made carbon neutral t-shirt than any sweatshop attire.
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NEW LET LOGO

The Ladies European Tour (LET) is showcasing its new vision and values at the ISPS HANDA Ladies European Masters this week, the flagship tournament being played at its headquarters, Buckinghamshire Golf Club. 

The logo has been refreshed to be more in line with the brand’s values which are: fresh, inspiring, approachable and connected.

Fundamental to the vision is a global tour, bound to local activity, from grassroots through to professional, allowing players to go all the way. It’s not just about the swing, but a day that goes with a swing: a big day out with fun activities, beautiful scenery and a festival atmosphere. The LET will be inspiring people all around the world to play golf.

What do you think of the LET’s revised logo? Does it convey ‘fresh, inspiring, approachable and connected’ to you?

My own personal taste is that the LET could have explored something more adventurous. However, often in the mainstream corporate world understated, elegant logos can be very effective.
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TRUTH ON THE LABEL ACT

"I've never really thought much about how the clothes are made … I dread to think that my summer top may be made by some exhausted person toiling away for hours in some sweatshop."

In a mall, such thinking counts as disruptive activity. The lexicon for most retailers runs from impulse buy to splurge to treat; they prefer us to wander the aisles with our eyes wide open and our minds shut tight. The whole point of a shopping environment is to drown out those inconvenient headlines about dead textile workers in Rana Plaza with a bit of pop music and a lot of advertising. Which is what makes the UK Uncut rallies so splendidly aggravating – because they undercut the multimillion-pound marketing with point of sale information about poverty pay for shop staff or high-street tax dodging.

They also underline how little we’re told about what we're paying for. Look at the label sewn into your top: the only thing it must tell you under law is which fibres it's made out of – whether it's cotton or polyester or whatever. Which country your shirt came from, or the accuracy of the sizing – such essentials are in the gift of the retailer. A similarly light-touch regime holds for food: after years of fighting between consumer groups and the (now eviscerated) Food Standards Agency, and big-spending food manufacturers, a new set of traffic-light labels will be introduced. Thanks to heavy industrial lobbying, it will still be completely voluntary.

How much sugar is in your bowl of Frosties: this is a basic fact, yet it remains up to the seller how they present it to you. By law you are entitled to more information about the production of your eggs than your underwear. Under current regulations, we know more about our battery hens than we do about our battery textile workers.

Consider: just over a year has passed since the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory, which saw more than 1,100 staff crushed to death and another 2,500 injured, many permanently disabled. Those people and the thousands of others working in similarly precarious and punishing conditions make the garments we wear and the electronic goods we fiddle about with. Yet they rate barely a mention. Outsourcing and globalisation may have brought down the price of our shopping, but it has also enabled retailers and brands to engage in a facade of blame-shifting and plausible deniability:

So here's a modest proposal: a new law that mandates more, and more relevant information, on the products we buy. Call it the Truth on the Label Act, which will require shops to display where their goods are made, which chemicals were used in production, and whether the factory is unionised. Stick it on the shelves, print it on the clothes tags. Big retailers can also display prominently in each branch how much tax they pay, and what they pay both top staff and shopfloor employees.

Such information is not hard for the big retailers and brands to provide. This information in itself won't change an entire economic system. But forcing businesses to admit exactly who is responsible for their economic success, and who reaps the profits, is a good start. Otherwise, we're entirely dependent on activists in changing rooms. By Aditya Chakrabortty The Guardian.
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