The co-founder of Ashworth starts again.

Linksoul is the second golf clothing brand in John Ashworth’s career. The first carried his name. English Wikipedia records that Ashworth was founded in 1987 by Gerald Montiel and John Ashworth as Charter Golf, Inc., working at first from an office in the Los Angeles garment district; in a 2018 interview with Golf.com, Ashworth dated the start to late 1986 and recalled his verdict on the market at the time: golf clothing, he said, was “ridiculously bad.” The same interview credits the professionals Fred Couples and John Cook, who were given small stakes, and Couples’s 1992 Masters win with making the brand known.

Ashworth left that company in 1997, citing “philosophical differences,” English Wikipedia says, and the Japanese retailer Golf Digest Online gives the same year. The Ashworth brand went on without him: in October 2008 TaylorMade, by then part of Adidas, agreed to acquire it, according to English Wikipedia, citing Business Wire, and it has since changed hands again.

Linksoul was his return. The company says it was “founded by John Ashworth and his nephew Geoff Cunningham, alongside a close-knit group of family and friends,” and a 2021 announcement describes Cunningham as an artist. Its home is Oceanside, the coastal city in northern San Diego County. Sources differ on the year. Golf.com wrote in January 2018 that Ashworth “founded Linksoul in 2009 as an act of rebellion,” and the San Diego Business Journal gave 2009 again in August 2025; Golf Digest Online, in an October 2023 interview, gave 2012.

Links, soul and a municipal course.

The name joins two ideas. A links, English Wikipedia says, is the style of golf course first developed in Scotland, and the company says the name comes from the idea of “links soul” — the connection people feel on a golf course. Golf Digest Online traced it to a line in The Kingdom of Shivas Irons, the 1997 sequel to Michael Murphy’s golf novel Golf in the Kingdom, describing golf as what links the soul to the flesh. Dan Costa, the brand’s current owner, gave the San Diego Business Journal a plainer reading in 2025: “it’s linking souls.”

The clothing was meant to break with the look of the course. In 2018 Golf.com described a brand that rejected the “golf uniform” in favour of clothes that work in the office, on the course and in the evening, and noted that “at Linksoul, cotton is still king.” A January 2021 announcement listed golf, surfing, yoga, hiking, travel and cooking among the activities its clothing and accessories were made for. Its website now greets visitors with “Enjoy Every Shot.”

The company’s public reputation also rests on a golf course. In March 2014 the golf writer Geoff Shackelford reported that Linksoul, with several partners, had formed Goat Hill Partners, LLC and proposed keeping the municipal course in Oceanside then known as Center City Golf Course open and renovating it, with the architect Tom Doak signed on to help. In December 2016 the Southern California Golf Association’s magazine FORE reported that Ashworth’s group was running what was now called Goat Hill Park, had removed turf, renovated the clubhouse and the driving range, and had been granted a 40-year lease by the city that November. Golf Digest Online, writing in 2023, described the course as close to Linksoul’s headquarters.

Linksoul also built a place to gather. In 2018 Golf.com described its Oceanside headquarters, the Linksoul Lab, as a large, repurposed industrial building with an event space favoured by local artists, and a shop it called “experiential, not transactional,” with dogs among the staff, custom putters on display and a bar.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all golf clothing names: Peter Millar, TravisMathew, Greyson, Holderness & Bourne, J.Lindeberg, Galvin Green and Linksoul. Five are American and two, J.Lindeberg and Galvin Green, are Swedish. Golf apparel brands sit at many different points in the trade, from founder-run labels that still carry a founder’s name or story to brands that now belong to larger golf, fashion or investment groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a club’s pro shop to a city department store.

A golf clothing brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single garment than by a name, a small logo on a chest or a cap, and the kind of player it promises to dress, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its design studio or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its clothing is 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 clothing is made and how its marks have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Bubba Watson to Dan Costa.

In January 2021 Linksoul announced that Bubba Watson, the two-time Masters champion, had invested in the company and would serve as a brand ambassador, appearing in its advertising and wearing its clothing on and off the course; no stake was disclosed. In July 2023 Golf Digest Online began handling Linksoul products, the Japanese retailer says.

The ownership changed in 2025. The San Diego Business Journal reported on 29 August 2025 that the entrepreneur Dan Costa, known for 5.11 Tactical and Kevin’s Natural Foods, had acquired Linksoul on 1 August 2025, through a company he had recently founded, TeedUp DF, LLC, after its investors became interested in selling. Dan Costa has owned Linksoul since 2025, and the paper listed him as chief executive. It reported that Linksoul had five employees before the deal, that Costa’s team would bring accounting, distribution and embellishment in-house, and that Costa planned to bring in Francisco Morales, a co-founder of 5.11, as a partner. Costa told the paper that orders had reached the brand’s factory partners late before the acquisition, delaying products for the season.

The San Diego Business Journal placed the company’s headquarters in Oceanside in August 2025; the company’s website now says “Our headquarters in Carlsbad, California, is both a design studio and a gathering place.” The website writes the name in capitals as LINKSOUL, and its about page says the brand is built on the belief “that what we make, and how we make it, matters.”

For a design guide, Linksoul shows how a founder’s story, a coastal place and a public golf course can carry a clothing brand as much as any logo. Compare G/FORE, another golf brand built on style off the course, and FootJoy, a long-established American golf clothing and shoe name. For this guide we use a navy, a dune sand and a sea-glass green with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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