RADMOR Founders Scott Morrison & Bob Conrad | Citizens of the Game

 

Before RADMOR was a company, it was a conversation.

Actually, a lot of conversations.

Most of them started more than 30 years ago between two University of Washington golfers who happened to be roommates, best friends, and fairly convinced they could make better golf clothes than the ones they were wearing.

We sat down with RADMOR founders Scott Morrison and Bob Conrad, the original Citizens of the Game, to talk about where the idea began, the very different paths they took after college, and what they’ve learned since finally building the company they first imagined all those years ago.

HOW DID YOU TWO MEET?

SCOTT MORRISON: Golf.

Bob and I were teammates at the University of Washington and eventually became roommates and best friends. We spent an unreasonable amount of time together playing golf, practicing, traveling to tournaments, and somewhere along the way we started talking about creating a golf clothing company.

You have to remember what golf clothes looked like in the early ’90s.

We had opinions.

BOB CONRAD: We still have opinions.

Laughs.

SM: Clearly.

But the idea was there, even then. We loved golf. We cared about clothes. And we didn’t understand why the two rarely seemed to come together in a way that felt relevant to us.

Then life took us in completely different directions.

BC: After Washington, I played professional golf for more than six years on what were then the Nike/Nationwide, Canadian and Asian tours.

Scott moved to New York and somehow became a huge denim guy.

SM: Somehow.

BC: He founded Paper Denim & Cloth, Earnest Sewn and 3x1 Denim, ran EVISU, and spent a couple amazing decades designing and making incredible clothes.

I kept playing golf.

SM: Which is why Bob is still a much better golfer than I am.

But we stayed incredibly close.

And the funny thing is, after all those years, we eventually came back to the same conversation we’d started in college.

What if we actually made the golf brand we always talked about?

WHAT FINALLY MADE YOU DO IT?

SM: A few things came together.

I had spent more than 25 years in fashion by then, and I had become increasingly interested in how clothing was being made, not just how it looked or how it sold.

What materials are we using?

Where do they come from?

How long will something last?

What happens to it when we’re finished with it?

Then I started playing more golf again and realized how dependent the golf apparel industry had become on virgin synthetic materials, particularly polyester.

There was an obvious disconnect.

We play this beautiful game outdoors, surrounded by grass and trees and water, yet so much of what we were wearing was derived from virgin petroleum-based plastics.

That contradiction became difficult to ignore.

BC: And once we started looking more closely, we realized there was an opportunity to approach golf apparel differently.

Not perfectly.

Differently.

SM: That distinction is important.

We never believed we were going to save the planet by making a golf shirt.

But we did believe we could make better decisions.

And if we could make something that looked better, felt better, performed beautifully and used more considered materials?

That felt worth doing.

WAS SUSTAINABILITY THE ORIGINAL IDEA BEHIND RADMOR?

BC: It was a big part of why we started, but I think RADMOR has always been about something broader.

It’s about making better golf clothes.

SM: Exactly.

Sustainability was never supposed to be the aesthetic.

You shouldn’t look at a RADMOR shirt and think, “That’s sustainable clothing.”

You should think, “That’s a great shirt.”

Then, hopefully, you discover there was more thought behind how it was made.

We use natural fibers where they make sense. Recycled synthetics where performance requires them. We think about durability, comfort, washability and longevity.

But the first job is still to make something you want to wear.

BC: And keep wearing.

SM: That might be the most important part.

The best thing you can do with a well-made piece of clothing is wear the hell out of it.

HAS YOUR THINKING ABOUT SUSTAINABILITY CHANGED?

BC: Definitely.

When we started RADMOR, sustainability was becoming this enormous conversation, and everyone wanted a simple answer.

There isn’t one.

SM: The word itself has become so overused that it can almost mean nothing.

There’s no perfect material.

Cotton has impacts. Polyester has impacts. Recycling has limitations. Manufacturing has impacts. Shipping something halfway around the world has an impact.

Anyone telling you otherwise probably isn’t telling you the whole story.

What we’ve learned is to focus on progress rather than perfection.

Use better materials.

Use fewer unnecessary synthetics.

Make better products.

Make things people actually want to keep.

And be transparent about the compromises.

BC: Buy less. Buy better. Keep it longer.

That idea isn’t particularly complicated.

SM: It’s also probably not the greatest slogan if your only goal is selling as much clothing as possible.

Laughs.

But we believe it.

WHO’S THE BETTER GOLFER?

SM: Bob.

Next question.

BC: Finally, an easy one.

Laughs.

SM: My game probably peaked somewhere around 1995.

Bob was just getting started.

He went on to play professionally, and even now he can show up having barely played, shoot something ridiculous and act like nothing happened.

We played a best-ball event a few years ago. I was grinding away, probably eight or nine over for the weekend, trying desperately not to embarrass myself.

Bob was something like 13 under for 36 holes.

I don’t remember him missing a green.

It was irritating.

BC: I remember Scott playing much better than that.

SM: That must have been the beers talking.

SCOTT, HOW DID YOU GO FROM GOLF TO DENIM, AND BACK TO GOLF?

SM: Golf came first.

I started playing when I was 11 and eventually earned a golf scholarship to the University of Washington. During college, I interned with clothing companies around Seattle, and after graduating I moved to New York in 1997 to work in fashion.

In 1999, I co-founded Paper Denim & Cloth.

Then Earnest Sewn in 2004.

Later, I became CEO and Creative Director of EVISU, and in 2011 I founded 3x1 Denim.

So what was supposed to be a sales job in fashion became more than 25 years of my life.

Golf never really left, though.

Bob and I stayed close. I caddied for him occasionally when he was playing professionally. We kept playing whenever we could.

Eventually, the two parts of my life came back together.

BC: Which is basically what RADMOR is.

Scott spent 25 years learning how to design and make clothes.

I spent 25 years obsessing over golf.

SM: It took us that long to become marginally qualified.

Laughs.

YOU FIRST TALKED ABOUT THIS IN COLLEGE. WHY DID IT TAKE SO LONG?

BC: We had to go live our lives first.

SM: I think that’s exactly right.

If we had started RADMOR when we were 22, it would have been a completely different company.

And probably terrible.

BC: Definitely terrible.

SM: By the time we actually started, we had perspective we couldn’t have had when we were younger.

Bob understood the game at a level very few people ever will.

I understood product, manufacturing, materials, branding, and all the mistakes you can make building a company.

We also understood ourselves better.

RADMOR came from all of that.

It wasn’t two guys deciding golf was suddenly interesting and starting a golf brand.

We’d been inside the game most of our lives.

AND THEN YOU DECIDED TO LAUNCH DURING A GLOBAL PANDEMIC?

BC: Brilliant timing.

SM: Impeccable.

We officially launched RADMOR in 2020 from a spare office inside EFESTĒ Winery in Seattle’s SoDo neighborhood.

Factories were closing.

Travel stopped.

Production was delayed.

We couldn’t meet with people.

We were trying to launch a brand while the entire world was trying to figure out what was happening.

What could possibly go wrong?

BC: Pretty much everything.

Laughs.

But something unexpected happened too.

Golf exploded.

People came back to the game. New people discovered it. Courses were full. Being outside suddenly meant something different.

SM: In a strange way, the world caught up with part of what we believed.

People were thinking more carefully about where they spent their time, what they bought, and what mattered to them.

Golf offered something people needed.

Space.

Nature.

Friendship.

A reason to spend four hours outside.

That moment reinforced why we loved the game in the first place.

SIX YEARS LATER, WHAT HAS CHANGED?

BC: A lot.

SM: And sadly not much.

Laughs.

The company has evolved.

Our design has evolved. The materials have evolved. Our understanding of what the RADMOR customer wants has evolved.

But the reason we’re doing it hasn’t changed at all.

We still believe golf clothing can be better.

Better designed.

Better made.

More thoughtful about materials.

More relevant to how people actually live.

BC: Golf itself has changed too.

There’s more style in the game now. More individuality. More people coming into golf from different places.

That’s healthy.

SM: Absolutely.

When we started talking about RADMOR in college, golf had a very specific uniform.

Today, people are interpreting the game in their own way.

We love that.

We don’t want everyone in golf to look the same.

We just want to make clothes worthy of the game, and good enough that you want to wear them long after you leave the course.

WHAT DOES RADMOR MEAN TO YOU TODAY?

BC: Friendship.

Golf.

And getting to build something we talked about when we were kids.

That’s pretty special.

SM: I’d say there's a lot of gratitude.

Golf has been part of our lives for more than 40 years now.

It gave us our friendship.

It gave us competition, travel, memories, heartbreak, a lot of laughs, and eventually this company. It's a lot of work, don't get me wrong, but there's a lot of beauty in it to.

RADMOR is our opportunity to give something back to a game that has given us an enormous amount.

We’re still learning. Still trying to make things better. Still over-analyzing golf shirts.

BC: There's a lot of over-analyzing golf shirts.

SM: Some things haven’t changed since 1992.

Laughs.

Two friends. More than 30 years of conversations. One shared love of the game.

The original Citizens of the Game.