Mizuno; Get Your Act Together Please

I went to Mizuno’s National Fitting Centre on 13^th January to be custom fitted for a new set of irons.

The whole experience was very good, I learned a lot and felt it was very worthwhile, even though all of my settings came out standard, meaning there wasn’t much customisation of my clubs required compared with an off the shelf set.

The order for the irons were put in there and then. The plan was that the order would be sent to their assembly plant in Cumbernauld, who would make the set up and send it out to my club pro. I was told at the fitting that by ordering via the National Fitting Centre I could expect a turnaround of 7-10 days. I was expecting to have my new clubs by January 22^nd.

Since I left the Fitting Centre that snowy afternoon in January everything has gone pretty much wrong.

I hadn’t heard anything by January 26^th, so I arranged for my club pro to chase Mizuno up. At this point I found out that the club heads were out of stock, but new stock was due in on 8^th February and my clubs would be sent out that week. Not ideal, but these things can happen, although I would have expected them to order more clubheads when they realised they were running low on stock.

The week starting on 8^th February was met with silence, so at the end of it I asked again for Mizuno to be chased up. The outcome this time was that there was a shortage of shafts, but more shafts are due in on 26^th February, and I am ‘towards the top of the list’ so my clubs should be assembled and distributed shortly after February 26^th. One thing that has turned up is the Fli-Hi 3 iron, so I have one club, and am still awaiting another 7.

A couple of things stick out here. You would think that in an assembly plant, the number of shafts would be enough to cover the number of clubheads? Secondly, the shafts are bog standard Dynamic Gold S300 shafts, they aren’t specially crafted from the triple filtered iron ore smelted by pygmies in a rainforest somewhere. They can be picked up anywhere.

I have always thought of Mizuno as a very efficient company, and all of the stories I’ve read about other people being fitted have been very favourable, however a delay of at least 5 weeks, probably more, on top of the advertised turnaround time, with me having to do all of the chasing up, is not acceptable.

The Fitting Centre have been fine, and my club pro is merely passing on messages from Mizuno, the problem seems to lie at Mizuno itself. Do they have cashflow problems? Do they have organisational problems? Why on earth have they run out of stock of two different components within a few weeks of each other? I still think they are a great clubmaker, but their customer service and communication has been absolutely appalling.

All this means is that I’m going to have a lot less time to get comfortable with my new irons before the serious competition starts. In a vain attempt to look on the bright side, I suppose it could be worse, I could have paid up front for them and be worried about being the best part of £700 out of pocket. Small mercies.

Footnote; whilst writing this post, I went to the Mizuno website to put in a hyperlink to their fitting centres, and found that their entire European golf website is offline. I hope this is for maintenance, otherwise I will start to worry.