Heady ambition: Stitch's leather head covers are scoring with U.S. and international golfers.

• Author: Pace, Lee
• Position: TAR HEEL ORIGINAL

Charlie Burgwyn's entree into the manufacturing business didn't stem from building a better mousetrap. Instead, he picked a price point for a mousetrap and figured out how to fill it. "I'd been in hundreds of golf shops, and you could find hats at $25, shirts at $65 and sweaters above that," says Burgwyn, who grew up in Murfreesboro and worked as a sales rep for Callaway Golf Apparel for five years before leaving in 2010. "There was nothing at the $50 price point. I thought it was very much underserved. That got me to thinking--what can you make and sell at $50 that's not being addressed now?"

Burgwyn liked a leather golf club head cover made by Carlsbad, Calif.-based iliac Golf, but balked at its $80 price tag. One day in 2011, he packed a bag at his home in Cary and drove to High Point and then to Hickory, telling his wife, "I am going to go figure out how to make leather head covers affordable."

He found a sewing shop in Hickory that also imported leather, and he had some prototypes made--simple designs in red, black, white, navy and khaki adorned with a racing stripe and a circle, modeled after a 1958 Porsche. He dispatched them to contacts at two famous golf clubs, Winged Foot in Mamaroneck, N.Y., and Shinnecock Hills in Southampton, N.Y., and immediately landed orders. Taking his wife's suggestion for a company name, Stitch Golf Inc. set up a display at the annual PGA Merchandise Show in Orlando, Ha., in January 2012. He left two days later with orders for 11,000 head covers. "I immediately knew I had a problem," he says. "That shop in Hickory had two ladies on sewing machines. There was no way they could produce 11,000 head covers."

Within a year, Burgwyn had his own operation in Cary, which he and his wife paid for out of personal savings. "My goal was to sell $300,000 in head covers the first year; I thought that would be a huge success," he says. "We did three times that." While he won't disclose current revenue, he says Stitch Golf is now...