Dreaming is easy.
A little over a year ago, Eric Hudson found himself dreaming about golf. He grew up in the game, competed in high school, was a member at Warkworth Golf Club for years leading up to the birth of his first child, and was dreaming about getting back into the game in a major way.
A heavy equipment mechanic by trade, Eric found himself at a crossroads. Pay Golf Town their per-club installation fee and wait a few days for the work to be done, or just do it himself. Having done much more complicated work already that day, he googled the process and got to work.
Over the next few months, he started doing more work on his own clubs and a couple of other jobs for friends, finding a calling for the process of building clubs along the way. His friends joked that he should open a fitting studio and do the builds himself. That’s when the dream truly took shape.
“I e-mailed everyone,” says Hudson. “Srixon, Wilson, PXG, SeeMore, Haywood. I e-mailed everyone that I could. I had virtual meetings with a bunch of them.” In the end, most manufacturers pulled back when they found out he didn’t have any fitting experience. SeeMore started working with Eric, but the fitting aspect was still missing.
And then came Haywood Golf.
They took a chance on Eric, so now it was time for Eric to take a chance on Haywood. A self-proclaimed brand snob, Eric asked Haywood to send him a set of heads so that he could put the Canadian DTC manufacturer up against his Titleist irons, and if they didn’t meet his standards, he wouldn’t move forward with the partnership.
“I knew they were taking a huge risk on me, but I’m not going to start selling a product if it can’t make it into my bag. So I bought a simulator, Haywood sent me a set of heads, and that was the first fully brand-new set of clubs I’d ever built.” From there, Eric took them directly into the simulator, and the Haywood CBs have been in his bag from that moment on.
From there, heads started to turn. A local player had moved into a brand no one else had heard much about, interest was starting to pique, and that’s when Eric knew he could pick up steam.
As Hudson recalls, “I needed guys to take a shot. I needed a couple of really good players to have these clubs. So I called in two guys and told them that I was going to create a couple of super cool builds for them at really good prices. In turn, if they liked the clubs, they were going to spread the word about how awesome Haywood was.”
Despite some fervent outlooks and brand loyalties, those two players were both won over. They are still gaming their Haywood builds to this day, despite proclaiming that Eric would have “zero chance” of converting them out of their previous gamers.
Eric knew all along that “all I needed were some good players who could vouch for the brand, to get people to believe that I wasn’t just playing them because of the working relationship. Those two builds have turned into significant sales.”
Not just sales, but significant business opportunities as well.
As previously mentioned, Eric was a longtime member at Warkworth Golf Club, which is just north of Brighton, Ontario. After the birth of his first child, though, he dropped the membership to focus on being a father. Until the owner of the golf course approached him with an offer he couldn’t refuse: rejoin as a member, and the club would promote The Golf Hut for all club work that needed to be done.
“I wanted to win the club championship one day,” admits Hudson. “So I rejoined as a member, and I’ve gotten quite a few people to work with me from there.” Yet his work is no longer limited to his home course. Through existing relationships with other course professionals in the area, he’s now having work sent to him from Timber Ridge Golf Course, as well as Black Bear Ridge Golf & Resort.
To this point, Eric has managed to sell just over 20 complete sets of Haywood irons in 2026 alone. To put a better perspective on that, he only built and tested his own set of clubs in October of 2025. The two sets he built to help get the word out were only built in January of 2026. Sitting here at the time of writing, in early June, that means Eric has been fitting and building a little more than one set of Haywood irons every week since he started serving the public.
“Nothing goes out of my shop without being perfect. Nothing goes out that I wouldn’t put in my bag,” states Hudson, and that has truly become the calling card for his work. “First impressions mean everything, that’s what my dad taught me. If I build a set of clubs, the ferrules are turned perfectly, the clubs are clean, the grips are new. So if other people see those clubs, they’re going to feel like, ‘Hey, this is the guy I want to build my clubs.’”
Time will tell if The Golf Hut takes over from Eric’s nine-to-five career. Since opening his shop just months ago, he has secured partnerships not only with Haywood, but KBS, No1 Grips, SeeMore, BB&F Co., and others.
In less than a year, he has gone from dreaming, to being turned down by major manufacturers, to doing. He has embodied the Underdog Spirit that unites the Blue Bandit Collective and, for that, we salute him.
XO Go Low,
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