Rick Martin might be the last of his kind. He and his daughter, Teri Martin Schleifer, design world-class, 100 percent pima cotton golf shirts in a marketplace dominated by synthetically-engineered merchandise. Not a man to mince words, he was once asked to measure himself against his competitors, to which he quipped, “I look at my competition in the eye every morning when I’m shaving.”

If that comes off sounding like an arrogant statement, Martin isn’t likely to care. He’s been habitually doing things his way — what he wholeheartedly believes is the right way —  for almost 40 years. He was the founder and visionary behind Fairway & Greene, an upscale golf apparel brand that re-introduced classically inspired, all-cotton shirts to an industry that was increasingly fixated with cost-cutting measures over quality.

A contentious relationship with his business partners led Martin to choose retirement in 2006. He sat on the sidelines until his non-compete expired and founded his own label in 2011, known simply as Martin.

“I had no intention of coming back into the business. I had taken my chips off the table and was very happy,” says Martin. “But my daughter, Teri, who had been with me in design the whole time at Fairway & Greene, conned me (and I mean this in the nicest way) into coming back and helping her get a new brand started. I said no, absolutely not, and gave her every reason in the world why I didn’t want to get back involved. But she prevailed.”

For Martin, old is new again. His shirt collection draws inspiration from an era when golf club professionals wore exquisitely tailored apparel and plied their trade on the nascent PGA Tour. Martin grew up admiring the cocky coolness and effortless style exhibited by Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Sam Snead and Cary Middlecoff. And while the role of the club pro has changed substantially over the years, Martin continues to design directly for them and their private club members who Martin describes as purveyors of a culture that expects a higher standard of craftsmanship.

Remove a Martin golf shirt from it’s packaging and you’ll be forgiven for mistaking it’s fabric for silk. It has a smooth, lint-free finish and a luster you would never come to expect from cotton. Inferior cotton shirts have a tendency to pill, shrink with repeated washing and fade over time. What makes a Martin shirt a Rolls Royce to another apparel maker’s Toyota is a keen attention to fabric selection and higher manufacturing standards.

“I spent a good deal of time in South America looking at Peruvian pima cotton which I found to be the quintessential golf shirt yarn,” says Martin. “The way we treat it gives it longevity so that shirt is going to stay like that for pretty much as long as you own it.”

The strands of cotton that are used to make the yarn (also known as staples) are of even length and originate from the same place. Many other companies use a less expensive pima yarn that is assembled from a hodgepodge of different factories in various countries which ultimately results in an inconsistent, inferior product.

Once the cotton yarn is selected, it undergoes a treatment process called mercerization that burns off lint and threads as well as the fibre ends, leaving a smooth finish and a great shine.

“It’s an impregnation of the cloth that performs two major functions,” says Martin. “Stability — to prevent shrinkage, and performance — to improve colorfastness.”

Martin uses a proprietary two-step mercerization process when most companies use one. The yarn is initially impregnated with a solution prior to knitting. The second, more expensive and time consuming step involves a machine about 70 yards long that bathes the knitted fabric in a solution to lock in it’s luster, color and resiliency.  To put it simply, “That’s what separates the look we have from other people,” says Martin.

Golf apparel designer, Rick Martin.

The Martin golf shirt is a luxury, and is most often the case with any luxury product, it isn’t designed to appeal to everyone. Thrift-seeking shoppers can look elsewhere. So can trendsetters. A company that leads with the motto “as timeless as the game” isn’t in lock-step with the rainbow of colors and patterns being worn on the PGA Tour.

For those of us determined to own a Martin golf shirt, finding a retailer can be a challenge; Martin apparel is limitedly distributed to select green grass shops (more commonly referred to as pro shops) across the country.

“We sell to golf professionals and we sell to some resorts that do have golf courses, but that’s as far down the retail chain as we go. We don’t do any internet retail sales,” says Martin. “Once we go outside of the mold of being part of the private club [culture], we become something less special. People will find a way to find someone who can help them buy one.”

Needless to say, Martin isn’t a person who easily parts with his core values, especially when it comes to having his name sowed into the back of a shirt collar. He founded Fairway & Greene in 1996 out of a desire to combine his love of golf with his talent for designing pure finish cotton shirts. By then, Martin had already been in the apparel business for nearly two decades, both in terms of managing Gant and C. F. Hathaway shirt companies as well as producing woven and knit shirts for Land’s End and Brooks Brothers.

Martin left the major labels behind just as manufacturing standards were on the skids.

“They were more concerned with price than with detail and attitude,” says Martin about Land’s End. “In the early days it was much more of a value-driven, fashion business.”

With Fairway & Greene, Martin had originally planned to go directly to the consumer out of frustrations he was having working with major retail partners, which often undercut their partners by releasing their own in-house brands. Fairway & Greene took to grassroots marketing, putting out a little catalog and using an advertisement in the Wall Street Journal to promote the brand and subsequently build their own mailing list. Their philosophy changed when Tom Nieporte, the then head professional at Winged Foot, suggested that they sell directly to the private country club community.

“My feeling is that the golf shop and the individual club is really the last apparel specialty store on earth,” says Martin. “It’s a retail operation that is being produced and developed for the member of that club and nobody else. So we stopped being a catalog business and went directly to the golf professional. And it stayed that way for as long as I owned it.”

Martin parted ways with Fairway & Greene when the company was acquired by Northbridge Equity Partners, which took the product beyond the golf shop to other retailers and more importantly, introduced synthetics into the apparel line to compete with the growing demand for moisture-wicking, performance apparel.

Martin’s daughter resigned from her post as VP at Fairway & Greene in 2010 and coaxed her father out of retirement. Martin, who was happy to be afforded the time to play more golf, wasn’t sure there was a vendor left in South Korea who was capable of manufacturing a shirt up to his exacting standards.

Martin, who believes that South Korea has the best needle work in the industry, recalls making the trip to meet the owner of the country’s largest finishing house.

“He doesn’t speak a word of English and I don’t speak a word of Korean,” says Martin. “We’re talking to each other through friends and he tells me, ‘I’ve been waiting for you to come back. I am so bored with all this other stuff that we’ve been making and I’m going to help you get this company started.’ This was eight weeks before we were planning to launch [our first] line. Normally it’s a 16-week process to produce your salesmen samples. So he cut that in half for me and produced the finest sample line that I’ve ever seen to that point.”

Part of the Martin Golf Apparel Collection.

Three years later, Martin Golf remains a quintessential boutique firm. Seven sales reps, all former Fairway & Greene employees, handle relationships with golf clubs all around the country. The Martin brand is almost exclusively found in clubs that have storied traditions, or newer clubs that maintain the proper pedigree. Martin has turned down plenty of business opportunities, as is his right, to maintain the values of what he believes is the best mark of the industry.

“The clubs that we don’t sell to are more akin to the retail operations. They’re interested in deals and discounts, and also whatever’s hot,” says Martin. “Our definitions conflict. We don’t discount anything for anybody. Why would I give a discount to your group when I don’t discount to Augusta National, or Pebble Beach or Pine Valley.”

The current Martin Golf apparel line is comprised of five collections: British Regimental, Vineyard, Charcoal Classics, Timeless Elements and Essentials. Each collection is influenced by a color palette derived from Martin’s golfing adventures and from his appreciation of nature. And while it’s obvious his shirts look good, they also perform. Each shirt is long enough to remain tucked into your trousers and features roomier c-sleeve arm holes so that the golfer has freedom of movement when making their backswing. For those of us who are growing fatigued from wearing clothes with billboard-sized branding, you’ll be happy to know that a Martin shirt doesn’t include any visible logos.

Martin remains active as the front-facing component of his apparel brand, but he has ceded the day-to-day operations to his daughter.

“I still help her and look over her shoulder,” says Martin with a wink. “But at the end of the day she’s going to be the one carrying the ball down the road.”

When asked to assess why there aren’t many other contemporaries in the apparel business, Martin gave a surprisingly simple answer.

“I’ve always considered myself someone who cares about quality, and quality can be had in many different kinds of products”, says Martin. “The one I’ve chosen is one of the hardest to produce and that’s why there’s so few people in it. I’m not a lone wolf in the business, but I am one when it comes to being dedicated to quality.”