A replacement for Big Bertha, named for a new century.

XXIO is a golf-club brand of Sumitomo Rubber Industries, the Japanese tyre and rubber group that also owns the Dunlop and Srixon names in golf. The first XXIO clubs went on sale in Japan in 2000, the business daily Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun reported in 2017; the Japanese golf retailer Nikigolf dates the launch to January 2000.

The name joins XXI, 21 in Roman numerals, for the century that was about to begin, with a final O; accounts of what the O stands for vary, and Nikigolf gives “go on” and “champion.” In Japan the brand is written ゼクシオ, “Zekushio.” A 2016 column on the Golf Digest website Minna no Golf Digest recalled that when the clubs appeared, many golfers did not know how to say the name and made up their own readings.

The same column explained why the brand was needed. Sumitomo Rubber’s partnership with Callaway ended in 1999, it wrote, leaving the company without the Big Bertha clubs it had been selling in Japan, and XXIO was created to take their place. The first driver had a 305cc head and a 46-inch shaft, a short neck and a sweet-spot mark on the crown borrowed from Big Bertha. Its developers’ rule, the column reported, was that a XXIO had to be easier to hit than Big Bertha — and that if it did not fly, it was not a XXIO. The second generation, in 2002, grew to a 350cc head on a 45-inch shaft.

The company behind it was not new to golf. Sumitomo Rubber’s corporate history dates its golf-ball and tennis-ball production to 1930 and its golf-club production to 1964.

Japan’s best-seller, one generation at a time.

XXIO is renewed in numbered generations. The Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun reported in December 2017 that the tenth, XXIO X, went on sale on 9 December that year. The paper described Dunlop Sports’ use of a simulation technology it calls “Digital Impact” to study how club and ball meet.

The run continued. Nikigolf’s list shows a new main-line generation every two years since 2011, with the 13th in December 2023 and XXIO 14 on 22 November 2025, alongside parallel lines: XXIO Prime, a premium range that began in 2001, and XXIO X-eks, added in 2019.

The audience is explicit. The company says the woods use VR-Titanium, a titanium alloy it calls a world first, and that the XXIO 14 driver has a hosel allowing loft to be changed by 1.5 degrees either way.

In Japan the brand’s ambassadors are women professionals. The XXIO website features Seira Aoki, Yuka Yasuda and Nana Suganuma, and in June 2021 the company reported Aoki’s second Japan LPGA Tour win, with a XXIO X driver. Dunlop also marks the 21st of every month as “XXIO Day.”

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make golf clubs: Cobra, Ben Hogan, Cleveland, PXG, Tour Edge, XXIO and Sub 70. A golf club brand has to work inside a narrow set of rules. The R&A and the United States Golf Association set what shapes and physical characteristics of clubs are allowed in competition, and the Rules of Golf limit a player to a maximum of 14 clubs in the bag, English Wikipedia notes — so every maker is designing variations on the same few objects: woods and drivers, irons and wedges, hybrids and putters.

Because the objects are so tightly defined, identity tends to live in the details: the shape of a head seen at address, the finish on a forged or cast iron, the name or number stamped on the sole, the colour of a headcover, and the way a brand sells and fits its clubs. Many modern iron heads are investment-cast from steel alloys, while forged irons remain popular with skilled players, English Wikipedia says, and heads, shafts and grips can be combined and fitted to a player in a great many ways.

The brands here differ in age, in ownership and in how they sell their clubs; two of them, Tour Edge in Batavia and Sub 70 in Sycamore, are Illinois companies, according to their own websites. Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who founded it, who owns it now, where its clubs are designed, made and assembled, and how its marks have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Designed in-house, made in Kyushu.

XXIO’s look is drawn inside Sumitomo Rubber. The development stories for XXIO 14 on the brand’s Japanese website credit members of the company’s product-development design planning group alongside its club engineers and golf-business staff, and the driver instalment is headlined as a “bold design change” meant to refresh the club’s image.

On manufacturing, the clearest statement comes from Dunlop Golf Club, a club maker in Miyakonojo, Miyazaki Prefecture, on the island of Kyushu. Those are the company’s and its staff’s own words.

XXIO sits beside two other golf brands under the same owner: Srixon, and Cleveland Golf, which Sumitomo Rubber’s sports subsidiary bought from Quiksilver in 2007, Reuters reported. In North America all three are sold by Dunlop Sports Americas, from offices in Huntington Beach, California, and Greenville, South Carolina.

For a design guide, XXIO shows how a brand built for one kind of golfer can be renewed every two years without changing its name or its promise. Compare Cleveland Golf, its stablemate, and Tour Edge, an American maker of game-improvement clubs. For this guide we use navy, silver and a clear blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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