A student’s import business in Vienna.

BIG MAX is an Austrian brand of golf trolleys and golf bags, run from Vienna. Its roots lie in an import business. In an interview with Golf Business News in August 2019, founder and owner Thomas Reiter said he set up his company, Golftech, in 1988, while he was a student at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. GolfMagic reported the same year that Golftech at first imported American and British golf products that were hard to find in Europe.

The brand itself dates from 1994. Reiter told Golf Business News that “in 1994, we decided to make our own pull trolleys, as there was a clear gap in the European market.” The name was personal: “My son Max had just been born, so I named the company after him.” The company’s own timeline also gives 1994 as its founding year, and it marked its 30th anniversary in 2024.

The first models were two-wheel pull trolleys; GolfMagic names the Basic and the Mid-Max among them. The turn to three wheels came, Reiter has said, from adapting a pull trolley so that it could be pushed. “I figured that it would be less stressful on the body to push the trolley,” he told Irish Golfer in August 2019. The first BIG MAX three-wheel trolley, the BM 500, went into production in 1997, according to Golf Business News.

That three-wheel design shaped what followed. GolfMagic credited the straight-axle Ti 1000 that came next with helping to carry the brand across Europe, and the BIG MAX name, chosen for a newborn, became the badge on a growing family of frames.

From the Ti to the Blade, and into bags.

BIG MAX’s range grew out of that push trolley. Golf Business News reported that the Ti 1000 followed in 2000, with a straight-axle design meant to improve stability and allow the frame to fold compactly; the Ti name survives in today’s Ti Lite, Ti Two and the electric e-Ti. Later came the compact folding IQ and Nano families, in push and electric versions, and the Autofold trolleys, which the company says were particularly well received when it began selling in the United States in 2012.

The most distinctive idea in the trolley range is the Blade series. Its trolleys fold flat rather than into a cube, a mechanism the company calls FlatFold, and the current line includes the Blade IP, Blade Trio and Blade Quattro. The company’s website groups its trolleys by how they fold — FlatFold and QuickFold — alongside its electric models.

Bags became the brand’s second pillar. The company’s timeline dates the AQUA series to 2014 and describes it as a waterproof golf bag line with sealed seams and zips; the range now includes cart, hybrid and stand bags under the AQUA, Dri Lite and Terra names. According to its timeline, the 2020s brought lighter, more compact trolleys and bags it describes as sustainable.

The company says it offers an extended warranty of up to five years on its products. Those are its own statements, and it does not set out on its website where the trolleys and bags are manufactured.

The range also reaches younger players. The website lists junior trolleys, the Junior Max 3W and the Junior Max Tiger, which the company says can be adjusted to a child’s height. Alongside the trolleys and bags it sells travel covers, umbrellas, headcovers, towels and spare parts, many of them tied to a particular trolley family so that, for example, an accessory is sold as fitting the Blade or the Autofold.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all names from the golf course’s carrying and clothing trade: OGIO, Sun Day Red, PowaKaddy, Motocaddy, Stewart Golf, BIG MAX and Clicgear. They cover golf bags, push carts, electric trolleys and a new apparel label.

A bag or trolley brand’s identity is usually carried by a name, a mark and a recognisable product shape rather than by any one model, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its manufacturing or changed the way it sells. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually designed and made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its range has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Still run by its founder, from Vienna.

BIG MAX remains tied to its founder. Golf Business News described Thomas Reiter as “owner and founder of Big Max” in 2019, and the brand’s website today names the operating company as Golf Tech Golfartikelvertriebs GmbH, in Vienna, with Thomas Reiter as managing director — the Golftech business he started as a student, under its full legal name.

The brand presents itself as Austrian. Its website says “we are at home in Austria” and uses the line “From Vienna into the world.” Its timeline sets out that spread: new markets in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada and South America in 2009, and the United States in 2012.

The visual voice is technical and product-led. Product names do much of the work — AQUA for waterproof bags, Blade for the flat-folding trolleys, Ti for the push-cart line that began with the Ti 1000 — and the website describes models by what they do, such as a Blade trolley the company says folds in under a second, or a Silencio bag top that it says holds each club in place separately. The founder put it in similarly practical terms to Irish Golfer in 2019, saying that at their core the products are designed to make golfers’ lives easier.

For a design guide, BIG MAX shows how a family name can become a brand — a founder naming a company after his son — and how a range can be organised around mechanisms people can see, such as three wheels and a frame that folds flat. Compare Clicgear, another push-trolley brand, and PowaKaddy. For this guide we use a strong red, graphite and aluminium grey with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep BIG MAX’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.