The Happiest Place in Golf

Chris Hovsepian sits alone in his garage, staring up at the wall. Behind his computer, all sorts of stimuli compete for his attention: mood boards, mock-ups, golf memorabilia, knickknacks and handwritten notes. One item in particular jumps out. In 1957, Walt Disney—from his home in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, about 12 miles south of the Hovsepian house in Sherman Oaks—sketched out a plan for how kid-friendly storytelling could fuel a raging fire of media, merchandise and amusement parks. 

His synergy map was a bold bet, but it worked. Hovsepian has a similarly wild idea for golf. 

“Jain’s only goal is to make kids fall in love with golf,” Hovsepian says. “And I think a character can do that better than a club.”

Considering what he gave up to chase the answer to this hypothesis, his gamble might be just as audacious as Disney’s. A decade ago, Hovsepian was a music-obsessed 22-year-old, fresh out of USC. The LA native earned an internship at Beats by Dre and started hustling immediately. Beats was disrupting the music industry, and Hovsepian suddenly found himself in boardrooms with luminaries like Jimmy Iovine, Trent Reznor and, of course, Dr. Dre himself. When Apple bought the headphone giant in 2014 for $3 billion, Hovsepian was absorbed into the big leagues of Apple Music and took his place in the center of the streaming wars.

Over the next few years, he would help discover and recruit a litany of artists who would go on to become household names, including Post Malone, Khalid and Billie Eilish. “I would only bet on an artist if they made me feel uncomfortable when they walked into a room,” he remembers. “Not because they did anything wrong, but because they clearly understood who they were.” A few years later, Universal Music hired him away to become its senior vice president of artist development. A few months before his 30th birthday, Hovsepian was on his way toward realizing his dream of becoming an industry heavyweight—maybe one day the head of a label. He was successful, he was driven, and he loved it.

Then the pandemic hit.

“The search for human beings and artists that could stand the test of time got shrunken down into ‘We need songs that can take us to tomorrow,’” he says darkly.

It became clear that COVID-19 had changed the music industry, and the version he knew wasn’t coming back. Suddenly stuck behind a desk, uninspired by the new reality of his landscape and facing a contract renegotiation, Hovsepian came to a crossroads. Over a typically gorgeous Southern California Christmas holiday, he retreated to his garage and drew a line down the middle of a whiteboard. On the left, he listed the things that made him happy: family, friends, music, being in nature. On the right, things that did not make him happy: everything about the music business. Despite having no plan for the future, he filed his resignation at Universal. To make things even more interesting, he had just become a father.

Hovsepian expected that one of the benefits of unemployment would be more time with his family, and he got it, quickly easing into a stay-at-home-dad routine with his daughter, Ella, while his wife, Nat, continued to work as an interior designer. But he didn’t see a golf obsession coming. He knew he wanted to play again; he hadn’t had time to get out since high school. Hovsepian admits he wanted to be good at golf back then, maybe even a little too much. For a decade, he thought of it as “a game that made me angry.” But he was a different person now, and he suddenly realized the game was exactly what he needed.

“Getting back into [golf] was just like riding a bike,” he says. “I started to see the game as a mirror to who I am and where I’m at in life. It kicked off this second wave of evolving who I was, and then it very quickly became clear that I wanted to dedicate my life to the game.”

When he wasn’t tweaking his swing, Hovsepian couldn’t help but notice the influence characters could have on children. While watching Ella obsess over Bluey, Elsa, Buzz Lightyear and Moana, the idea for Jain Golf came into focus. “I want to spend as much time with my daughter as humanly possible,” he says, “and if I want golf to be a part of that, I want her to see herself in golf. The idea behind Jain Golf is to present these kids with a character they can enjoy and see themselves in—that fires their imagination. [A great character] can make them see golf in a way that is so different from when you turn on a golf broadcast right now.”

In 2022, Hovsepian officially launched Jain Golf with the debut of its mascot: a cute, fun-loving, world-traveling, golf-obsessed globe that he hopes will become the sport’s Mickey Mouse one day. Why a globe and not a golf ball? Hovsepian hired a graphic designer from France who barely spoke English and played even less golf. “I told him I wanted to make a kids’ book called Jain’s World, and he thought I wanted to make Jain shaped like a world,” Hovsepian laughs. It’s one of what he says are many “happy accidents” that have led the brand to its unlikely success.

Since launching, Hovsepian has landed several corporate partnerships. One with Topgolf has seen Jain sell out kids’ golf camps from Los Angeles to Augusta. At these camps, kids do everything from face painting to creating their own bucket hats to putting contests. One recent camp in LA partnered with Malbon to raise money for First Tee kids affected by the wildfires.

Jain has become popular in golf’s Instagram merchandise universe, routinely and almost immediately selling out of product offerings ranging from six-club carry holsters to sunglasses and stuffed Jains. An animated series is in the works, as well as books and other spinoff content. Back in his garage, Hovsepian reads a thank-you email from a young mother in California who recently bought several Jain items online and says that her son is now “fascinated” by golf. “I read it in the car and immediately started bawling,” he says.

“Nothing Chris does is for himself,” says Ben Boskovich, editor of Skratch. “He puts the brand, the audience he seeks and his own toddler’s point of view ahead of all of the noise that can exist in this space if you let it. I don’t know that there’s a much more exciting and creatively fulfilling outlet for kids who are either curious about golf or whose parents want to introduce them to it in a whole new way.”

Long term, Hovsepian wants Jain’s synergy map to produce a professional golfer. Until then, he’s pushing the Jain moniker to symbolize that golf is played here and kids are welcome. To that end, he’s focused on creating dedicated spaces for kids at PGA and LPGA tour events. Like the rest of the Jain brand, this goal is fueled by his own experience. “You pay for tickets and finally find parking,” he says, already exasperated, “then you walk 30 minutes to the entrance. It’s hot. By the time you get through the gates, your kid is tired and just wants a Popsicle. Now you have to tell them to be quiet because Scottie Scheffler is hitting. Why not have a dedicated area for kids where they can learn about the game, hit some shots and goof off while parents catch their breath?”

His prototype was put into practice in April at the LPGA’s JM Eagle LA Championship. Kids buzzed around bounce houses, art stations and massive Jain mascots. “THE DREAM,” Hovsepian wrote on Jain’s Instagram. “Can’t wait to do more of this forever.”

Among the myriad effects the 2020 pandemic had on golf, the influx of creativity and investment from nontraditional golf spaces might be the hardest to quantify. Even casual golf fans have no doubt noticed a tsunami of new golf apparel brands, equipment start-ups and tech gizmos. There are even venture-capital funds dedicated solely to seeding golf brands. But unlike many of the post-COVID golf companies, Jain seems to have a uniquely clear mission. Selling shirts is a means to a more important end: making kids fall in love with golf.

To do this, each touchpoint must be on point: fun, lighthearted, vibrant and endearingly childish. The brand’s Instagram follows Jain as it travels across the golf world: sprawling out on the front lawn at Pinehurst, wandering around TGL’s SoFi Center, floating in a raft around the island green at TPC Sawgrass. A new T-shirt design spells out “The Loop Theory” on the back: “Breathe big, touch that grass, find your rhythm, believe in magic & enjoy the loop—one day you’ll remember this game was always here to bring you back to yourself.” It’s all pure, colorful, wholesome fun, even when the mechanics of running a business and raising a family often can be anything but.

Hovsepian admits he’s dug deep into his music-career savings and drained his 401(k) to make ends meet while connecting the dots on his synergy map. Is there pressure? Absolutely. Does it faze him? Absolutely not. “I like when things feel uncomfortable,” Hovsepian says. “Thankfully, Nat is a little bit more risk averse, so we have balance.”

Whether or not Jain Golf reaches Disney synergy levels remains to be seen. In some ways, that will depend on the gatekeepers of one of the world’s oldest and most historically proud games buying into the unusual vision laid across Hovsepian’s garage wall. It also will come down to the evolution of this character that Hovsepian believes so deeply in, and its ability to connect with children. So, he keeps working, because he can already see the early returns.

“My daughter has asked me to go to the golf course thousands of times since I started Jain,” Hovsepian says as Ella watches Bluey on the couch in the garage. “I’m already successful.”