When a craze or fad crops up, you’d think the companies catering to it would enjoy booming business but that isn’t always the case. Sometimes, the fad just means more competition. That’s what the management at Direct Composite Technologies Inc. in the City of Industry found out.

The company makes golf club shafts and sells them to golf club companies and to golf shops. The recent surge in the sport’s popularity has not helped business as much as the company hoped.

Sales manager Jay Johnston told interviewer Wade Daniels why, and how the company is dealing with the situation.

Everyone knows that for the past couple of years since Tiger Woods became popular, golf has been a hot sport. That’s been great for the sport and has repaired golf’s image as a snobbish and elitist sport. But it hasn’t meant much better business for our company, which manufactures golf club shafts. Sales have gone up a few percentage points, but not as much as we’d have hoped from all this.

This is mainly because everybody and his brother is trying to make money off the sport. What a lot of people are doing is buying up cheap golf club shafts from overseas and putting some fancy-sounding name on them. Then they go and market them as being as good as ours but cheaper.

In a lot of cases, their claims about better quality are not true. So to some extent, these companies are having some success because for a lot of people who don’t know the difference, all they see is price, price, price.

Our challenge these days is to set ourselves apart from those newcomers, who are probably just going to be into it while the sport is hot and then never be heard from again.

Since quality is not as big an issue as it should be, we have to focus a lot on marketing and making our pricing equitable. We recently set up new standards of pricing for people and smaller businesses who want to get a discount for quantity buys. We wanted to attract more smaller buyers.

We also have to get people to know our name and recognize that over the years, we will be a long-term company we were established in 1995 and have 15 employees right now. So we are focusing a lot on young golfers and building a base of business in the junior market. This market is generating a lot of business these days because of Tiger Woods.

We also are introducing some new products at the PGA Merchandise Show at the end of January, as well as some new marketing strategies. I won’t say what they are until then. Golf is such a competitive market that we are doing in-house printing of the promotional materials that we’re readying for the show; we couldn’t take the chance of having them done at a printing house where some printer’s brother or cousin might work for our competition and show them our stuff.