G/Fore names Scott Ruerup CEO, with street shoes due next year

G/Fore, the luxury golf brand owned by Peter Millar, has named Scott Ruerup chief executive officer and given him a clear brief: grow the label well beyond the course. Ruerup has actually run the company since January, after Suzy Biszantz left, but the appointment was only made public last month.

His growth targets are concrete. The brand will introduce its first lifestyle street shoes next year, and womenswear, now roughly 35 percent of sales, is singled out as the expansion area. The pivot in fabrics is just as deliberate: fewer performance-heavy pieces, more cotton-rich cloth across both menswear and womenswear.

Ruerup arrives from Peter Millar, the Richemont-owned maker of luxury sportswear and golf attire. He joined that business in 2011 as vice president after nearly 17 years at Oxxford Clothes, and later became its president, spending 13 years helping it grow into the menswear and womenswear lifestyle brand it is today.

The plan is, in his own words, to replicate that playbook. Today 80 percent of G/Fore's business is centred on golf, with footwear alone accounting for half of sales, and he wants to copy the Peter Millar shift into what he calls a 'golf-adjacent' lifestyle product rather than stay pinned to performance polos.

How independent G/Fore stays from Richemont

Ruerup reports to Peter Millar chief executive Scott Mahoney, who made him his first offer in 2011. But he is at pains to say the company operates independently. 'Our design, marketing, stores are all G/Fore,' he said. 'I don't have to call Richemont or Scott Mahoney every day.'

Accepting the job came with a condition attached: the headquarters had to leave Los Angeles for Raleigh, down the street from Peter Millar's own offices in what Ruerup describes as a 'real cool industrial part of town.' Peter Millar agreed and built the space, and he calls the integration almost seamless.

The move has paid a back-office dividend, because G/Fore now shares finance, supply chain and shipping functions with Peter Millar. It also forced staffing changes. Ruerup brought in Adam Rutledge from The North Face as senior vice president of strategy and operations, and Tyler Copeland to lead creative marketing.

Thomas Harvey, who has led design for four years after stints at Theory, Original Penguin and Perry Ellis, stays. His job, in part, is holding onto the details people already buy: contrast collars, cuffs and plackets, and subdued patterns. Ruerup praises the London-born designer's 'global sense' and his travels.

Where the brand came from

G/Fore was founded in 2011 by Mossimo Giannulli, the designer who made his name with the Mossimo label in the 1980s. It began as a single coloured golf glove, an out-of-the-box idea that found a niche, then grew into golf-influenced footwear and apparel before being sold to Peter Millar in 2018.

Giannulli left the brand last year. Ruerup leans hard on his founding story. 'Everything we do has to have a touch of that innovation,' he said, pointing back to the first coloured glove as a signifier to instil daily. 'We were born in L.A., we were shaped in golf, and our legacy is style.'

Ruerup came to fashion through craft. A Savannah College of Art and Design graduate, he sewed his own suits and his mother's dresses as a hobby, took a business degree at his father's urging, then ran a store for active young people for four years before joining Oxxford to learn hand sewing from its master tailor.

At Oxxford he rose from customer service through product, design, marketing and technology. That range caught the attention of Chris Knott, a Peter Millar founder, who sent him an airline ticket to visit the Raleigh headquarters, where he met Knott and Mahoney and was offered the vice president role.

Sales this year are up 38 percent, and the products that move are golf skorts and cashmere polos and sweaters. Distribution is centred on 1,700 green grass shops, but the brand recently landed in 15 Nordstrom stores and will target specialty stores later, once the lifestyle component is ready for them.

Ruerup says he has known those specialty buyers for 30 years but has not yet approached them. G/Fore's four own stores, on Madison Avenue in New York, Worth Avenue in Palm Beach, Beverly Hills and Scottsdale, are what he calls 'think tanks' for gauging response to lifestyle product.

His stated goal is a 'really cool, fresh, modern, contemporary look' at the 19th hole, 'not just another performance polo.' He says he feels no pressure: at Peter Millar, 'we never talked about revenue,' and the team backed each other through small mistakes. 'We're going to do the same at G/Fore.'

He adds that the team will work with urgency 'for no other reason than this business is fast,' and that the company is not chasing something. The glove that started G/Fore remains the reference point, with every new product expected to carry a detail that reverts to it.

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Image: G/Fore