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At the end of 2023, Costco found itself with a smash hit on its hands courtesy of the set of golf clubs that started flying off shelves as soon as they dropped. However, the company now has a lawsuit on its hands courtesy of TaylorMade.
There are plenty of reasons Costco boasts a sizeable and loyal legion of customers, and one of the keys to its success is the Kirkland Brand, a generic in-house label that boasts some of the best deals the warehouse store has to offer.
Many of the products that fall under that umbrella are produced in the same factories that pump similar (and, in some cases, identical) name-brand alternatives, and if you opt to go that route, you’ll usually get top-notch quality for a fraction of the price you’d pay for a more well-known competitor.
Prior to last year, Costco had already carved out a solid niche for itself among golfers thanks to the Kirkland golf balls that have developed a cult following in addition to drivers and wedges that are able to hold their own without breaking the bank.
As a result, plenty of people were very intrigued when Costco announced it was branching out with a set of irons that retailed for $499. Those clubs quickly sold out after going on sale in December, and plenty of scalpers did what they could to flip them for hundreds of dollars above their retail price.
One of the major reasons golfers were drawn to the irons was the fact that they seemed to be clones of the TaylorMade P790s, which sell for a slightly less reasonable $1,400—and it appears the brand also took notice.
According to Golf, Costco and the Southern California Design Company (which produced the clubs) found themselves on the receiving end of a lawsuit TaylorMade filed in California earlier this week that asserts the two parties violated five patents while creating the irons.
The patents in question relate to the design of the head of the iron, with a particular focus on the polymer insert and tungsten weights TaylorMade harnessed to set its clubs apart before Costco followed suit (in an interesting twist, the legal filing claims the Costco clubs don’t even contain the advertised “injected urethane insert”).
The lawsuit—which also contains links to multiple Reddit posts concerning users who were intrigued by the similarities to the P790s—states “Taylor Made has suffered irreparable harm” and seeks an unspecified sum in damages in addition to a permanent injunction to cease the production of the competing clubs.