Convenience Creates Loyalty

ShipSticks founder and former State Amateur champion Jonathan Marsico delivers more than golf with Ship&Play

By Jon Rizzi

If the golfer Jonathan Marsico squared off today in match play versus the businessman Jonathan Marsico, they’d halve every hole with birdies or pars, with rare concessions.

The contest would take place on one of the world’s top courses — probably Bandon Dunes — with both competitors using their own clubs, which were waiting for them at the course courtesy of ShipSticks, the company Marsico co-founded in 2011.

Despite a golf résumé that includes qualifying for three USGA championships, winning two Castle Pines Charlie Coe Invitationals and capturing the 2008 CGA State Amateur title, Marsico the golfer would ultimately fall to Marsico the businessman in extra holes.

“My competitive spirit lives in the professional business world now,” the 43-year-old 1.3 handicap at Castle Pines and Cherry Creek says. “Competing at work and coaching my kids’ teams is about all the competition I have time to focus on these days.”

Marsico started ShipSticks while honing his business, finance and management skills at Marsico Enterprises, the private investment firm founded by his father, Jim. He left the family business in 2022 after 16 years to focus on expanding the club-shipping service that he and partner Nick Coleman had unveiled 11 years earlier.

Coleman left the company three years ago, and Marsico has become not only the CEO and executive chairman of ShipSticks, but also of Ship&Play, a company he soft-launched last year for the delivery of golf, bicycles and ski/snowboard equipment, luggage, boxes, trunks, strollers, car seats and anything cumbersome except firearms.

“We’ve had hunters want to use us, but there are too many liability issues,” Marsico explains.

Ship&Play follows the business model of ShipSticks, which began after Coleman, a Florida resident, paid $400 to have his clubs sent ahead to Scottsdale rather than fly with him to a gathering in New York before heading to Arizona for golf with Marsico. The pair decided there was a market for a more convenient, efficient and affordable method of club delivery. They leveraged relationships with the major shipping companies to get volume rates, partnered with as many top-tier golf courses as possible (Bandon Dunes was an early, pivotal partner) and made booking pickups a snap to do online.

Round-trip services started at $49 and went as high as $225.

The result: a hassle-free one-stop shop for getting your golf clubs to and from your destination. It eliminated schlepping your weighty, unwieldy hard case or travel bag to check in and waiting forever to claim it at the carousel. And no more dealing with the anxiety over whether you’ll miss your coveted tee time because your clubs missed a connecting flight.

ShipSticks customers easily arrange pickup and delivery of their clubs online, print and attach a shipping label to the travel bag (or, if they don’t have a travel bag, ShipSticks provides a box). A representative picks them up and has them delivered directly to the club or course you’re playing. You can track their location in real time. The clubs wait for you at the course, often on the back of the cart in which you’ll ride.

Thanks to the shipping rates ShipSticks negotiates, the cost is usually lower than if you checked them as oversized luggage or sent them direct via UPS, DHL or FedEx. Plus, ShipSticks includes $1,000 of complimentary insurance and up to $6,500 more for a small fee.

And if there’s any issue, ShipSticks offers end-to-end customer service, with 65 golf-savvy representatives under one roof in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., providing 24/7 assistance enhanced by perpetual technological innovation. The company now moves more than 500,000 bags per year and is the official club-shipping partner of the PGA of America. In addition to Bandon, it also enjoys partnerships with courses at Streamsong in Florida and Pinehurst in North Carolina, as well as the hundreds of Troon properties and thousands of other resorts and clubs in the U.S. and abroad.

Knowing the importance of those relationships, ShipSticks also staffs a “green grass” team that liaises with clubs, resorts and courses.

“We’ll always be ShipSticks,” Marsico says. “There is enormous brand equity there. We’ve built trust and a very loyal customer base. Now it’ll be “ShipSticks by Ship&Play.” Hopefully, it will arouse a little curiosity and make people aware of what we offer.”

People might find it curious that ShipGo, an apparent Ship&Play competitor, is owned by Ship&Play. ShipGo — which targets family vacationers and travelers who have likely never heard of ShipSticks — stresses the convenience of shipping luggage while providing the same suite of services and price points as Ship&Play. “As we continue to build the Ship&Play brand in the market, we’ll evolve the offerings of each brand,” the company’s Chief Marketing Officer Stephanie Retcho explains.

Data and behavioral analysis about ShipSticks’ customers also informed the company’s expansion. “What do golfers do besides play golf?” he asks rhetorically. “They ski. They travel on vacation. They might send their kids to camp [Ship Camps is another Ship&Play company] or college [the shipplay.com blog also features such titles as “How to Pack for College”]. We can grow our ecosystem organically.”

The ShipSticks ecosystem greatly benefits from people with “real golf industry experience” in customer support. Marsico acknowledges that growing this ecosystem to serve customers more interested in, say, biking Tucson’s Starr Pass Loop than teeing it up at nearby Starr Pass Resort requires delivery of  “broader customer service” to nongolf travelers.

It also requires keeping pace with technology and innovation—as well as the attendant customer expectations. “Our world today is all about ease of use and immediacy of response,” he says.

“So,” he says, “we’re in the early stages of integrating our system with Uber’s. Just like you’d get a ride — or food from Uber Eats — within minutes of booking your pickup, a car will arrive for your clubs, your skis, your luggage or whatever and deliver it to the nearest shipping location.”

Also, with advances in smartphones precluding the need for home computers and printers, the printed shipping label may soon go the way of the printed airline ticket. And just as a QR code on your phone now serves as a boarding pass, so too will a QR code containing a teach item’s shipping information appear on a customer’s phone once they have scheduled a pickup. The code gets scanned, and the information follows that item every step of the way to the destination and back again.

Now that those destinations also include cruise liners and other decidedly non–golf locations, Marsico is building those relationships the way he did with the courses, resorts, golf management companies and tour operators that helped establish ShipSticks as the leading golf-club shipping service in the US.

Luggage delivery service is a $6.13 billion global industry, with US travelers currently spending $2.27 billion for the convenience of not having to check their bags. Statistics suggest these numbers will continue to rise, and Marsico believes Ship&Play’s established track record in the golf niche—coupled with a robust infrastructure, innovative technologies, high-touch customer service and key strategic partnerships—positions it for a chunk of that growth.

Of course, he now faces far more competitors with Ship&Play than he did when he started ShipSticks, but you just know the competitive golfer and businessman will take his best shot and concede nothing to outdo them.

Jon Rizzi is the founding editor of Colorado AvidGolfer