Steve Seman has attended the Carolinas GCSA Conference and Show with a contingent from a massive club. Now, he’s seeing the event from a different perspective.
Seman, the former director of purchasing for The Cliffs, a seven-course community in the Carolinas, is a first-time exhibitor with Augusta Road Company, an apparel business he started four years ago.
The company offers direct sale uniforms and apparel to multiple industries, with Seman recently increasing efforts to connect with golf course superintendents. He has golf industry clients in the Carolinas, Florida and California.
Seman provided tips to GCI on how superintendents can get their crews looking and feeling their best.
Consider looks
Seman recommends thinking beyond heavy-duty uniforms and cotton polos. This could mean providing crew members with brands that are traditionally associated more with the pro shop than the maintenance facility.
“What I find is that the golf course superintendents and their crews obviously want to be comfortable and look good and have some more fun stuff to wear instead of the solid navy polo that gets laundered every week and returned to them,” Seman says.
Stretch it out
Lighter and more flexible clothing are trends in outdoor workplaces.
“They used to sell those indestructible industrial pants that guys never cared for because they were stiff,” Seman says. “Now, you can get some really, really good products that have good stain-released properties and they are comfortable and much lighter weight in the pants and shorts side. In shirts, everything is with performance fabric with moisture-wicking. There is a lot of technology that goes into apparel these days that’s pretty broadly desired and accepted out there now.”
Morale matters
There aren’t just performance advantages to providing your crew with the right gear. There can also be psychological benefits to handing an employee a shirt with your course’s logo.
“It’s a sense of pride, getting everybody to take pride in that this is our brand that we are trying to support,” Seman says. “We only want you wearing the brand and hopefully looking good while you are doing it. It’s not just the golf course industry, but everybody I do business with. I get business this time of year because people sometimes want to give a holiday gift to their associates and giving a nice jacket or something like that is a popular thing to do. Employees get really jazzed up about that stuff, especially front-line guys, which are what a lot of the golf course crews are.”
Dreams and reality
What should your crew wear if you step into a budget bonanza?
“If money was no object, all of those guys would want to have GORE-TEX head-to-toe on their guys for the nasty weather,” Seman says.
In almost every case, though, budget limitations prevent superintendents from handing crew members any rain gear, let alone pricey material. Still, Seman says compromise solutions can be found.
“There are some options where they can get a completely seam-sealed waterproof lightweight packable rain jacket and pants and outfit very affordably that’s keeps employees extremely dry,” he says. “Most of these guys in the Carolinas, it’s not super cold all the time so it doesn’t have to be a real heavy garment. A lot of the stuff I get requests for are jackets that can get them through most of the winter that might not make them so hot this time of the year where it might be cold in the morning but you get a nice temperature later in the day. You have a lot of adaptable products really.”
Guy Cipriano is GCI’s assistant editor.