The story behind Aretera’s first-of-its-kind shaft design

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 Aretera co-founder Alex Dee, 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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ALEX DEE’S OFFICE is everywhere and nowhere.

Some days, it’s the beach. Others, it’s his bedroom. On this sunny Southern California afternoon, Dee is talking shop over Vietnamese noodles in a Carlsbad food court — a far cry from the corporate confines he occupied for a quarter century at one of golf’s most influential shaft makers.

Dressed in jeans and an untucked shirt, Dee, 55, gives off the air of San Diego surfer meets Silicon Valley entrepreneur, with the focused intensity of an engineer and the laid-back ease of a guy who lives blocks from the ocean. For most of his professional life, Dee worked out of Fujikura’s Carlsbad satellite office, where he helped make the company a market leader in shaft design. His fingerprints were all over Ventus, the stiff-tipped shaft that dominated after first appearing on the PGA Tour in 2018.

Ventus was groundbreaking. But it also hinted at an industry-wide outlook that, over time, increasingly clashed with Dee’s own views.

“I always felt that when people in the industry talked about increased stability, it was associated with added stiffness,” he says. “The two were treated as synonymous.”

That’s not how Dee saw it. In his view, a shaft could be both supple and precise. Responsive and reliable. Playable at no cost to accuracy. As an engineer, he believed there was always more to learn, more ground to break. He’d also started sensing how success could calcify into orthodoxy, discouraging the very experimentation that produced it.

He wanted to keep pushing. He wasn’t certain he could do that where he was.

By then, he was also watching his kids navigate high school with a fearlessness that made him reconsider his own choices. Dee’s son and daughter were both embracing risks in their social and academic lives.

“In most families, it’s the parents who are role models for the kids,” Dee says. “In my case, it was the opposite. They were both taking big swings. They inspired me to want to take one too.”

In 2023, Dee left Fujikura. In theory, he was retired.

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In practice, he was waiting for the right idea. It came from Michel de Fontaine, a longtime friend and former classmate from UC San Diego who’d gone on to a career in start-ups. In college, the two were just as likely to be bouncing volleyballs on the beach as burying their noses in books. They’d often joked about doing something together — a coffee shop, maybe a taco stand. This time, de Fontaine was serious. They should start a shaft company.

The pair brought in two other golf industry veterans: Chris Elson for sales, Bill Stiles to handle customer relations. All four pooled their savings and founded Aretera, a name drawn from the Greek arete, for the pursuit of sustained excellence.

“I like to describe our team as three guys with nearly 100 years of combined industry experience, and one sensible person,” Dee says.

One thing they all found sensible was not having a formal headquarters. No brick-and-mortar space. Just four friends working toward a common goal, free of bureaucracies and hierarchies.

Dee has always played golf but never a lot of it. Even with more latitude in his schedule now, he’s more often on his laptop than on the links, propelled by a straightforward but subversive thesis: Stability and stiffness aren’t the same. To prove it, he has turned to a proprietary carbon fabric and applied it with uncommon precision, oriented at a 45-degree angle to resist torque and placed in the shaft’s internal layers. The rest of the shaft stays free to flex and respond. Maximum effect. Minimal intrusion.

If that sounds like marketing speak, it’s not Dee’s lingo. He’s a numbers guy to the core, allergic to claims that can’t be measured.

When Aretera launched, it had no Tour presence, advertising budget or endorsement deals. Just four reputations and a first-of-its-kind design. That turned out to be enough. Clubmakers and fitters embraced Aretera. Within a year, the company had released the EC1, built for players with smooth tempos. A second line, the AO2, arrived this winter for more aggressive swings.