It’s early December, six months removed from her breakthrough win at the 2025 U.S. Women’s Open, and Maja Stark is finally starting to feel her competitive fire again.

That might sound like a strange thing to say about a major champion and top 20 player in the world, but Stark’s recent form has been missing something. Despite her Open victory at Wisconsin’s Erin Hills in June, the months since have been somewhat of a struggle.

“When I won, I kept thinking, Well, I’ve just done the biggest thing I’ll probably ever do in my career,” Stark says. “For weeks, maybe months, I couldn’t stop thinking about that week. And it made me lose some motivation. I didn’t really know what to chase next.”

The 26-year-old Swede is describing post-achievement depression, something only those who’ve reached the summit are familiar with: the emotional letdown after a peak accomplishment. She’d fulfilled a dream she held since childhood. All of her dreams, in fact: Solheim Cup winner (with Team Europe in 2023); Olympian (for Sweden, at the ’24 Games in Paris); LPGA Tour winner (the ISPS Handa World Invitational in 2022); six-time winner on the European circuit; and now, major champ. All of a sudden, the résumé felt  … complete.

“It was like checking off the last big box,” she says, calling from her home in Nashville, Tenn., where she moved after her stellar run at Oklahoma State University. “I’ve experienced so many amazing things already, and I wasn’t sure what else there was after that.”

In the wake of her Erin Hills triumph, Stark missed seven of her next nine cuts. That’s when her team stepped in.

“They helped me understand what was going on,” she says. “We sat down and started creating new goals. Small ones at first.”

They weren’t lofty — example: two more top 10s before the 2025 season ended. And she didn’t always meet them. But they served their purpose.

“I needed something short term to feel stressed about,” Stark says with a laugh. “In a good way. I needed something to chase.”

That renewed sense of the chase is central to who Stark is—not just as a competitor but as a technician. Her Open win didn’t come from riding a hot streak. In 2025, she had just one top 10 prior to arriving at Erin Hills. It came from solving something.

“I had really low confidence going into that week,” she remembers. “Nothing was clicking. I was trying to find anything at all.”

That “anything” turned out to be a simple trigger. While prepping with her coach, Joe Hallett, Stark noticed something about her putting routine: She always hovers the putterhead slightly above the ground before taking it back. What if she tried the same thing with her irons?

“I thought maybe it would help me let go of control and start the swing smoother,” she says. “I had a million thoughts in my head, and I just needed one that cleared the rest out.”

There was another small key too: keeping her eyes locked on the ball longer through impact, preventing her hips from firing too early and spinning her open. The combination helped sharpen her contact. Perhaps more importantly, it helped quiet her mind.

Stark remembers the moment she sensed that something big might be brewing. It wasn’t on Thursday of that week. It wasn’t on Sunday. It was Wednesday, on the front nine of her practice round.

“I was hitting really good irons, and [Golf Channel course reporter] Karen Stupples came out to the tee where we were,” Stark says. “When someone like Karen — a past major champion — is watching, you want to show you’re good. I flushed a 4-iron into the 8th to a really scary pin and made birdie.”

It wasn’t a predictor of victory, but it was a hint, a surge of belief that showed up at exactly the right time. When the week ended with her lifting the trophy, the gravity of it became real. Calls poured in from her parents, her coach and, most memorably, fellow Swede and mentor Annika Sörenstam. “She took time out of her little Alaska trip to call me,” Stark says. “That was really cool.”

Now, months later, Stark’s perspective on that week is more grounded. She’s grateful for the win but equally grateful to feel “normal” again — to feel the healthy pressure of improvement, to care about the present rather than the past, to return to the chase. Short-term goals still guide her day-to-day, but a new long-term vision is taking shape too. The major didn’t mark the top of a mountain, it marked the beginning of another climb.

“I feel stressed about my golf again, and, for me,” she says, smiling, “that’s a really good feeling.”

Unquestionably, the techies and engineers who design the game’s newest equipment are fully fit to do the job — and, with each new club, to deliver dazzle to your own game. But some gearheads like to go in a very different direction, because disruption isn’t merely about breaking things. It’s about being radically better.

The golf equipment industry is loaded with big brains and lofty diplomas. Ballistics PhDs from aerospace. Engine designers from automotive. Materials scientists from advanced manufacturing. They make up a vast army of eggheads, pouring their expertise into a game governed by conformance rules and rooted in tradition.

Innovation happens constantly, though not always as dramatically or regularly as advertisements suggest. Golfers crave the next breakthrough. Manufacturers promise it with every product cycle.

But genuinely disruptive ideas are rare. They don’t arrive on schedule and can’t be conjured by a marketing blitz. On the face of it, they seem to appear out of nowhere, like a hole in one, but they spring from tireless effort, a tolerance for risk and a willingness to question what others accept as settled.

Innovators like L.A.B. Golf’s Sam Hahn, whose story you can read below, didn’t just contribute to groundbreaking products — they challenged assumptions about how gear should be designed, built and sold.

***

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LONG BEFORE HE bought into the golf industry, L.A.B. Golf CEO Sam Hahn, was sold on golf. Deeply invested. Fully addicted.

As the owner of a bar and music venue in Eugene, Ore., he worked nights and played by day. When he wasn’t swinging clubs, he dissected them in niche corners of the internet, mixing it up with fellow gear obsessives, sharing reviews and strong opinions. He talked a good game and flashed one too. Looping his local muni, he whittled his handicap to scratch.

But putters drove him crazy. Like many golfers, his relationship with flatsticks followed the arc of teenage romance: hot and heavy at first, fueled by infatuation and the thrill of draining a few long bombs, until betrayal spoiled the mood. The putter would go cold. Confidence would waver. Another club would gain favor. And the pattern would repeat.

Still, through countless cycles of heartache and frustration, Hahn never lost hope that he’d find “the one.” When he finally did, it wasn’t much of a looker.

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It was ugly, in fact. Bulbous and awkward, with a hollowed-out circle on the back, the putter — then known as the Directed Force — called to mind a metal detector married to a satellite dish. So much for appearances. The first time Hahn took it to the course, he one-putted the first seven greens.

Even when he missed, the experience was edifying. Hahn had always adjusted his stroke to fit a new putter. With the Directed Force, that burden vanished. Because the head was balanced to the lie angle of the shaft, aligning the center of gravity with the shaft and grip, there was no need to manipulate it.

“With every other putter, I was fighting to keep it square,” Hahn says. “And now I realized my job was just to let it stay square.”

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Two weeks later, the love affair was interrupted when the putter head fell off. Hahn sent it back. Along with a replacement, he received a call from Directed Force inventor Bill Presse IV, an industrial engineer in Reno, Nev., who apologized. Presse was struggling to make the company work. The two got to talking. Before long, Hahn, along with his father and brother, bought out Presse’s partners and relaunched the company as L.A.B. Golf — short for Lie, Angle, Balance. That was in 2018.

Getting a new company off the ground is like hitting driver off the deck. It’s difficult and risky. Hahn dove in with a naivete that turned out to be a strength. His outsider status gave him an edge. Hahn, who is 45, with a dark mop of hair, glasses and a lean build, had never had a commercial stake in golf. But he knew how to connect with people. He had a founder’s willingness to engage and a gearhead’s credibility with his audience. He was also online “pretty much 24-7,” he says.

When the pandemic hit, his audience grew larger and more captive than ever. Hahn leaned into the moment, though he never thought of it as marketing. He was proselytizing what he saw as truths.

Momentum gathered gradually, then suddenly. What had begun as whispers in gear forums migrated onto the game’s larger stages. L.A.B. racked up PGA Tour wins and influencer endorsements. When J.J. Spaun rolled in a 65-footer to win the 2025 U.S. Open with a L.A.B. in his hands, a company that began with a cultish following captured next-level national attention.

A little more than a month later, L.A.B. sold a majority stake at a valuation north of $200 million.

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Ever since we launched our first putter, Directed Force, golfers have been asking if we could make it less weird. DF3 is that putter.
DF3 still does everything golfers love about the original. It stays square by itself. It’s still irrationally forgiving on mishits. But there’s a lot less to think about.
The DF3 is entirely CNC milled from 6061 aluminum, with 8 screws on the bottom made of steel or tungsten in various densities to precisely target swing weight and lie angle balance each putter.

$559.00 from Fairway Jockey

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It’s a larger operation than it once was, with 260 employees, but Hahn has stayed in Eugene, running the company out of a building that overlooks Emerald Valley Golf Course, the public course where he first put the putter into play. It takes him no more than 90 seconds to get from his desk to the first tee. He plays as much as ever, maybe more. He’s a plus-3 now.

His office is cluttered with training aids, clubs, headcovers, ball markers — all samples from aspiring entrepreneurs seeking advice. He tells them “your people are everything,” especially in an industry that is brutal on newcomers. Hahn is part of the establishment now, but the culture of his company hasn’t shifted. He has hired someone to field the flood of direct messages L.A.B. receives. But if you DM the company, there’s a good chance you’ll hear back from Hahn himself.

For golfers who know the pattern of putter romance, that kind of commitment is hard to beat.