HAYDEN, Idaho – Feb. 19, 2005 – Henry-Griffitts, the game's premier manufacturer of custom-fitted golf equipment, has launched an ambitious new shipping policy, whereby any club order placed with the company by noon will be shipped out to the customer the following business day.

Previous shipping timetables saw Henry-Griffitts deliver new clubs within 7 to 10 business days. HG's competitors in the custom-fit sector continue to offer lag times anywhere between one and three weeks.

"Basically, we now guarantee that orders received here by noon will be shipped out the next day - if the customer chooses overnight delivery, they will arrive within 48 hours of placing of the order," says Henry-Griffitts Production Manager Grant Hobson. "Nothing has changed in terms of our production time or quality standards. Every club is still hand-assembled with painstaking care, to the tightest tolerances in golf.

"The difference is, our ordering and routing processes have been completely computerized. Today, in most cases, a production order is on the floor and we've started fulfilling it before the customer hangs up the phone." Henry-Griffitts does not sell its premium equipment through traditional retail outlets. The Idaho-based firm fits and sells through a nationwide network of HG-Certified Teachers, trained PGA professionals and swing teachers who custom-fit every customer individually. HG refuses to sell any of its drivers, fairway metals, irons and putters without fitting the customer first.

"HG has been fitting and selling this way since we pioneered the dynamic fitting process in 1983, and for almost that long, we've frankly struggled to reconcile the inconvenience - to our customers - of getting fit for a new set of golf clubs and waiting a week or more to receive them," explains Henry-Griffitts CEO Jim Hofmeister. "Thanks to Grant and our state-of-the-art routing procedures, the new system solves this problem without compromising our production standards one iota.

"We know that custom-fitted clubs out-perform off-the-rack equipment, and we know Henry-Griffitts offers the finest custom-fitted product in the business. Now we have the industry's fastest fulfillment, too."

As a licensee of SST PURE, Henry-Griffitts "PUREs" upon request each shaft using proprietary computer software and sensitive data-acquisition sensors. The SST PURE process analyzes the structural irregularities that exist to some degree in every golf shaft and locates the shaft's most stable orientation. Because Henry-Griffitts takes the care to hand-assemble the club with the shaft in its PURE orientation, off-line bending and twisting are minimized and impact repeatability on the center of the clubface is greatly enhanced.

The PUREing process takes time, but Hofmeister adds that even those PUREd Henry-Griffitts clubs will be shipped out the next business day.

Henry-Griffitts continues to resist any mechanization of its manufacturing process. It hand-assembles its equipment to the tightest tolerances in golf - head and shaft weights are confirmed to within a single gram; graphite shafts are specified to within a single frequency revolution.

This degree of precision is vital because HG-Certified Teachers fit their customers with the same precision using The HG Fitting Cart. By equipping these test sets with screw-on/screw-off club heads, HG-Certified Teachers can mix and match club specs to suit each customer right there on the practice tee. HG's patented Inter-Changeable System, or ICS, enables customers to hit every combination of weight, flex, lie, loft and off-set imaginable - 6,500 different club combinations, all at the fingertips of every HG-Certified Teacher.

Hobson recognizes that shaving six days off production might raise questions about the maintenance of HG's vaunted quality and precision standards. "Again, absolutely nothing has changed in our production methodology We continue to produce our clubs and sets with the same exceptional quality," Hobson says. "Folks need to understand that most of our time on the production floor is spent on the preparation of goods - the heads and shafts. Not on assembly.

"For example: drilling club heads to ensure they weigh exactly what they're supposed to weigh. Our club head manufacturers have their own weight tolerances; our tolerances are tighter than that. If I order heads that are supposed to weigh 'X', the heads I receive might vary from 'X' plus or minus 5 grams. You never want to add weight to a club head; that's not sound. So we order heads on the heavy side and remove weight from the hosels ­- to make sure our weights match the clubs in our fitting carts exactly. All that drilling and sorting is done ahead of time.

"When we receive a box of 100 [graphite]] shafts, they will frequency plus or minus 7 cycles from the number I ordered. So we check the frequencies on each one and sort them into 14 different flex bins, so we can be as accurate as we need to be. Steel shafts vary just as much; we sort them just as strictly, but on the basis of gram weight. All that work is done prior to assembly."

According to Hobson, this obsession with precision translates into golf club performance, which translates into customer loyalty - something the men in production can see.

"Match orders are our favorites," he says. "That's when someone orders a set and likes it so much, they start filling it out. Say the original fitting was 4-iron through sand wedge. As the customer gets better with their swing, more confident in the new clubs, they go to a 3-iron. That's a match order, and we see them a lot. Match orders tell you the fit was a success and the clubs were built perfectly to specifications. That's pretty exciting for us production guys because those are happy customers for sure."

To learn more about Henry-Griffitts, its new shipping policy, or to find the HG-Certified Teacher nearest you, contact HG at 800-446-0036 or visit www.henry-griffitts.com.

Contact:
Hal Phillips
Phillips Golf Media
207-926-3700
onintwo@maine.rr.com