Branding the Hillbilly Open

Golf courses are huge. And, more or less, they all come with the same ingredients: fairways, greens, flags and 18 holes.

So the challenge wasn’t to put the Hillbilly Open logo everywhere. It was to create a character you could recognize across an entire course.

Our approach was pretty pragmatic: find the touchpoints where we could make the biggest difference with simple ideas. Take things that already belong to golf and do them our way. And put things on a golf course that probably shouldn’t be there in the first place.

© Pius Martin

  • The Tag

    Every player received untreated regional leather with one instruction: bring it to the tournament. There, each tag was individually branded on both sides, turning it into a personal piece of Hillbilly Open.

  • © Fabian Karner

  • The Gate

    The first thing players saw was a huge banner portal built from scaffolding poles. Raw, temporary and improvised. That character became the visual language for everything that followed.

  • © Fabian Karner

  • The Signs

    The wayfinding was hand-painted and stencil-lettered, imperfections included. Some signs gave directions, others just carried the Hillbilly attitude across the course. Not perfect by design. Impossible to mistake for another tournament.

  • © Pius Martin

  • The Flags

    Some things don’t need reinventing, just doing properly. So we printed every Vibecaddy flag by hand. An unreasonable amount of effort for a flag. Which was kind of the point.

  • © Pius Martin

  • The Headcovers

    We had the club headcovers produced locally and finished by hand. Made for the weekend, but made to stay with the players afterwards.

  • © Pius Martin

  • The Shirt

    The crew shirt had a job beyond identifying the crew. THIS SHIRT ENDS THE DRESSCODE. One shirt, one line. A clear statement about what kind of golf weekend this was.

  • © Fabian Karner

  • The Barrel

    A spray-painted barrel kept changing jobs throughout the weekend. Signage, furniture, serving point. Nothing precious. Nothing built for one single purpose.

  • © Fabian Karner

  • The Bar

    And then there were the Mai Tais. Served straight from red gas cans, the mobile bar moved around the course. Not exactly traditional golf.

  • © Fabian Karner
© Fabian Karner

In the end, branding a golf tournament isn’t about putting logos everywhere. It’s about making the moments that matter unmistakably yours. Things people can touch, use and remember. Handmade, temporary or deliberately overdone. Make golf great again.

Photo & video content by Pius Martin, Fabian Karner & Marius Fritsch