Share this
by Tim McLain on September 1, 2026
Brands selling into green grass golf often build their wholesale process around their largest accounts and then wonder why it does not fit the pro shops. The reason is in the shop's own numbers, and Circana publishes them in its annual report for AGM.
The shop
The average AGM member shop is 2,302 square feet, with a median of 1,300. That gap between mean and median matters. Half of these shops are smaller than a modest apartment.
Average 2024 gross merchandise sales were $2.103 million, working out to more than $900 per square foot. Average gross margin was 35.8 percent, with a median of 34.1 percent. Mean inventory turnover was 2.65 times. Shrink averaged 1.4 percent with a median of 1.0 percent.
The average facility hosted just over 44,000 rounds, at about $48 of retail sales per round.
What those numbers mean for how they buy
Put 1,300 square feet and 2.65 turns together and you get a buyer with no room for a bad decision. Every square foot is contested, every buy displaces another buy, and a slow moving assortment is not a margin problem, it is a floor space problem.
That is why specialty buyers behave differently from national accounts. They order narrower and more often. They need live inventory rather than a promise, because a backorder they did not expect is a hole on a small floor during a short season. They reorder against what actually sold last week rather than what they forecast last winter.
Digital maturity is also lower than most brands assume. Half of respondents do no online sales at all, and among those who do, online averages 8.2 percent of sales, up from 6.4 percent the year before. So the shop is not running a sophisticated omnichannel operation. It is running a floor, and the wholesale tooling has to be simpler than a national account portal, not more complex.
The people placing the orders
The average respondent has 15.1 years of experience in retail merchandising and has been in their current role for almost nine. 71 percent are the primary retail decision maker for their facility, with another 21 percent actively contributing to the choice.
This is not a channel where a buying committee needs convincing over two quarters. One experienced person decides, and they decide quickly. What they will not do is learn a difficult system for one brand.
How brands are serving it
Primo Golf scaled to more than 1,000 green grass accounts by making every approved retailer self sufficient before their first order. Turtleson opened 185 new shopping relationships and $114,000 in Community revenue by becoming discoverable to retailers already buying elsewhere on the platform. Straight Down ran more than 70 microsites in a single year at an average of $11,000 in event revenue each, which is how a small floor participates in business it has no room to stock.
None of those are technology stories. They are access stories, sized to a shop with 1,300 square feet and 2.65 turns.
Source. Shop economics from Circana, LLC, 2025 Membership Study for the Association of Golf Merchandisers, published December 2025. Online survey fielded October 15 to November 18, 2025, with 274 respondents, plus 173 Platinum Awards respondents incorporated in aggregate for the Golf Shop Statistics section. Respondents skew toward green grass and private club facilities, 71 percent private, with most located in the Southeast and only 12 responses from Off Course specialty operators, so these figures describe green grass and private club golf retail rather than golf retail as a whole. Circana notes that small sample bases should be read for direction only.
Brand results are drawn from published RepSpark case studies and reflect those brands' own reported outcomes over the periods stated. RepSpark works with 250 brands and 100,000 retailers.
