A golf professional, his pupil and a would-be tour player.

TravisMathew was founded in 2007 in Huntington Beach, California. The Orange County Business Journal, writing in March 2014, named three co-founders: Travis Brasher, then chief executive; John Kruger, then majority owner; and Travis Johnson, who was pursuing a professional golf career and left shortly after the company was founded. Brasher had been head golf professional at SeaCliff Country Club in Huntington Beach, and Kruger, who ran a metal manufacturing business in nearby Seal Beach, met him by taking lessons from him, the paper reported. The first orders shipped in 2008.

Brasher put the idea simply in that 2014 interview: “No one was making clothes that you could wear on and off the course.”

The name has its own story. Today’s Golfer, in a profile last updated in February 2025, credits golf fanatic Travis Matthew Johnson as the man who set out to fix the stiff golf clothing of the early 2000s, and says the brand’s name is his own, deliberately altered — hence the single “t” in Mathew. The two accounts put the weight on different founders; the Business Journal’s 2022 profile again lists all three.

The early years were built on tour exposure. Today’s Golfer’s timeline gives 2008 as the brand’s first appearance at the PGA Show, 2009 as its first PGA Tour win, with Geoff Ogilvy at the Sony Open, and 2012 as the year Bubba Watson won the Masters wearing TravisMathew. In 2014 the brand opened its first store, at Fashion Island in Newport Beach, according to both Today’s Golfer and the Business Journal, and in 2016 it moved its headquarters to Graham Street in Huntington Beach.

Callaway since 2017.

On 21 August 2017, Callaway Golf Company of Carlsbad, California, announced that it had completed its acquisition of TravisMathew, LLC, in a release filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The release described a premium men’s sportswear business with “a distinct Southern California vibe” and a golf heritage that had grown to include other lifestyle apparel and accessories, sold through its own stores, better department stores, country clubs and resorts, and said TravisMathew would keep operating from its Huntington Beach headquarters.

The parent company has since changed its shape around the brand. According to its annual report for 2025, it completed a merger with Topgolf in 2021 and renamed itself Topgolf Callaway Brands Corp. on 6 September 2022; it sold Jack Wolfskin in May 2025; and, after selling a 60 per cent interest in its Topgolf and Toptracer businesses to funds managed by Leonard Green & Partners with effect from 1 January 2026, it changed its corporate name back to Callaway Golf Company on 15 January 2026. That report lists the ongoing brand portfolio as Callaway Golf, Odyssey, TravisMathew and OGIO, so Callaway has owned TravisMathew since 2017.

Under Callaway the store network grew. The Orange County Business Journal reported in May 2022 that TravisMathew had five stores at the time of the acquisition, including the one at its headquarters, and 31 by the end of 2021, with plans that included a store in Japan and one at St Andrews in Scotland; it named Ryan Ellis as president and chief executive. Today’s Golfer dates the St Andrews store to 2022 and says it sells clothing in a registered Scottish tartan.

The tour roster grew too. Today’s Golfer records that Jon Rahm moved from adidas to TravisMathew in 2021 and won the US Open that year wearing the brand, and it opens its profile with Rahm on the way to his Masters win.

On manufacturing, the 2014 Business Journal article said most of TravisMathew’s products were then made in Peru and parts of Asia. Callaway’s 2025 annual report says its soft goods in general are made by third-party manufacturing partners in Vietnam, China, Indonesia, Thailand, Bangladesh, Cambodia and Peru, without breaking that down by brand.

Golf clothing as a brand business.

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.

An ‘M’ with a ‘T’ cut into it.

The brand’s best-known device is its monogram. Today’s Golfer describes an “M” whose arches are cut so that a hidden “T” appears inside it — a “TM” for TravisMathew — and notes that golfers often ask what the “M” brand is. The full name is written as one word, with no space and a capital M in the middle.

Today’s Golfer also names TravisMathew’s core colours as black, white and grey, and describes the St Andrews range as blending those colours with a hint of the golden sand St Andrews is known for. The same profile puts the brand’s early test as “elegant, sexy, rock ’n’ roll,” and its timeline lists the brand’s first Volkswagen bus fixture in 2011 — part of a Southern California image of surf, sand and sun that the Business Journal also describes.

For a design guide, TravisMathew shows how a monogram and a tight three-colour core can carry a casual golf brand from the course into everyday wear. Compare Callaway, the club maker that has owned it since 2017, and Peter Millar, a North Carolina golf label in a more formal register. For this guide we use black, white and grey with a touch of sand and a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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