Sean Toulon spent a good part of the 2000s building TaylorMade's putter business with the Rossa line, including the Spider mallet shape which remains a popular high-MOI putter.
However, Toulon has moved on from TaylorMade and is now trying to strike out on his own with Toulon Design, presenting a line of high-end, high-performance putters.
Toulon Design has five models for 2016, each named after American cities important in golf or family history. The designs were influenced by manufacturing technologies and techniques from the aerospace and defense sectors, with each having a satin finish and sporting a milled, diamond-pattern face which promotes overspin.
The Madison putter is the flagship blade with a symmetry between the shoulders and bumpers and an L-neck hosel.
Similar to the Madison is the San Diego, which sports the L-neck but has crisp linear lines and a milled radius and edge.
The Rochester, named after the hometown of Walter Hagen, is a shorter, snub-nosed blade, designed for the player who wants a blade, but with the forgiveness of a cavity-back design.
Toulon's half-moon San Francisco design has a longer hosel and a wider flange. It has one alignment sight line and a cavity to frame the ball for alignment.
The Memphis is the company's only face-balanced, mallet-style putter, using a single-bend shaft as part of the overall design aesthetic of reducing competing and confusing lines.
All five models, available in 33-35 inch lengths, are milled from a single block of 303 stainless steel, later fusing the hosel and head together to create the feel of a single piece. Each putter, which weighs 350 grams, has three different sole plate options -- 7-gram aluminum, 20-gram stainless steel and 40-gram tungsten -- to match players with their stroke and grass type on which they putt.
There are also two counterbalance options, dubbed for players with a "moderate" or "aggressive" release. The "moderate" option uses a stainless steel sole plate to bring the head weight to 365 grams and is counterbalanced with a SuperStroke Midslim 2.0 grip and a 25-gram butt weight. The "aggressive" option has the tungsten sole plante that raises the head weight to 385 grams and is counterbalanced with a SuperStroke MidSlim 2.0XL grip with a 50-gram butt weight in a 38-inch model.
All five Toulon Design putters putter models are available at $399, while the "moderate" counterbalanced putter costs $459 and the "aggressive" counterbalance putter costs $499.
