How Gage Benevento Built Haven Golf From a $13,000 Credit Card Into a $2.4 Million Brand

In May 2025, Gage Benevento walked into his manager's office at Amazon and quit. He had spent five years climbing the company ladder from overnight warehouse shifts to engineering program management to launching fulfillment centers across North America — and he was earning $200,000 a year. By every measure that matters in corporate America, he was set. But for the previous two and a half years, his attention had also been on a side project called Haven Golf, a small golf apparel brand he had started with $13,000 on a credit card and no experience in fashion, manufacturing, or e-commerce.

The year he quit, Haven Golf did $2.4 million in revenue.

This is the story of how Gage's golf obsession turned into a business idea, how he navigated starting his brand with zero experience, his unlikely marketing strategies that actually worked, and what happens when you stop planning and start doing.

A Pandemic Golf Obsession Turned Business Idea

In 2020, like millions of others, Gage took up golf. What started as a pandemic-era pastime quickly turned into an obsession and then a business idea.

He kept noticing the same thing every time he played: the polos.

"Every polo fit me different. I just really started to notice what other brands were doing and I also saw how much golf was growing. I was like, you know, maybe I could create something myself." - Gage Benevento, Haven Golf

He had no background in apparel, no contacts in manufacturing, and no road map. What he had was a problem he had personally lived, a market he believed in, and a willingness to figure things out along the way.

Building Haven Golf With $13,000 and No Experience

Gage heard about Import Yeti from a TikTok — a tool that lets anyone search import records and see which factories real brands are buying from. He then hired a designer on Fiverr to mock up the first polo. He put $13,000 on a 0% interest credit card to fund inventory and samples. Six months after he committed to the idea, in December 2022, Haven Golf launched.

"The truth is I kinda just went for it. Figured it out along the way. Analysis paralysis. I think if you think about all the ways that it could go wrong, then you're never gonna do it."

The First Year of Entrepreneurship: He Nearly Quit

The first year of Haven Golf almost killed it.

Gage did $10,000 in sales and by his own count, roughly $9,000 of that came from friends and family. He was still working his corporate job at Amazon during the day and grinding on Haven Golf at night. The hours were piling up. And for three or four months, he effectively stopped working on the business.

"I was very close to quitting and did quit for a solid three or four months. Sales weren't coming in. I was spending so much time on it."

What pulled him back was something very small: one customer. A random buyer he had never met had left a review that said, "this is the best polo I've ever worn." As Gage scrolled through his other reviews, they all said similar things.

That's when it clicked that all he had to do was get the product out there. The problem wasn't his product, it was the fact that no one knew it existed.

The Surprising Marketing Win That Changed Everything

Gage sent hundreds of unanswered emails to golf journalists, writers, and editors. He wasn't asking them to write about his brand but merely introducing himself and offering to send some gear to get their thoughts on it. Most went into the void but he kept sending them anyway, with no promise of anything coming from it.

Only one ever responded.

"Sent him some product and then I didn't hear from him. One day I'm at work and my phone starts dinging. I used to maybe get one order in a week and all of a sudden I had gotten like 15 orders in an hour."

The journalist had included Haven Golf in an article showcasing the hottest new golf brands of 2023.

That article was the spark that brought Haven Golf back to life.

Finding the Winning Polo Design Strategy

The press hit gave Haven Golf its first wave of unknown, paying customers. It also gave Gage the data he needed.

He started to see which polos people actually wanted to buy. One in particular took off: a polo nicknamed the Mamba. It outsold everything else. That planted the seed of a strategy that has carried Haven Golf ever since.

The Mamba Polo, Haven Golf

Rather than churn out generic designs, he leaned into polos people could identify with — pieces tied to college towns, regional pride, communities of fans who already had emotional attachment to a place. Instead of competing on price or trying to out-luxury the legacy brands, Haven Golf gave its customers a polo that said something about who they were.

The first full year after that pivot, Haven Golf finished at $92,000 in sales.

"Finished 2024 at $92K and then the goal post moves and you're like, 'what if I could do a million dollar in a year?'

Growing from $10,000 to $2.4 Million: The Trajectory

The numbers from there move fast. Really fast.

Each month grew bigger than the last and by the spring of 2025, Haven Golf had outgrown the side-project model. The math no longer worked: he was leaving more growth on the table than his Amazon salary could replace. So he quit in May 2025.

"There was never gonna be a perfect time to quit my job, I just had to do it."

He thought of it not as a romantic leap but as a calculated bet on himself.

Across the first two years of Haven Golf, Gage did about $100,000 in total sales — a slow build, mostly powered by night-and-weekend hours, one sale at a time. The third year, 2025, landed at $2.4 million. The 24x jump wasn't one campaign or one viral moment. It was the compounding effect of small things working together. More press coverage, a launch of facebook advertising, and more design drops that people identified with.

He's now running Haven Golf full time, with a record year underway and a brand that has gone from a $13,000 credit card experiment to a multi-million dollar business in 36 months.

What Founders Can Take From the Haven Golf Story

Haven Golf was built on a handful of small decisions he made differently from most aspiring founders.

1. He acted before he felt ready. He didn't spend a year researching, comparing manufacturers, or waiting for the right co-founder. He moved fast, failed along the way, and took those learnings with him.

2. He used public tools to fill his knowledge gaps. Import Yeti for sourcing. Fiverr for design. A 0% credit card for capital.

3. He paid attention to his customers. The note from a random buyer that pulled him out of his near-quit was, statistically, nothing. But he treated it as a signal to shift his mindset from "no one wants my product" to "no one knows about it".

4. He kept going after hundreds of nos. The press hit that kickstarted Haven Golf was buried inside a long tail of rejections. He treated outreach as a numbers game and didn't stop.

   
   

5. He paid attention to the data. The Mamba polo didn't need to be his favority, but it was the market's. Once he saw it, he doubled down on designs people had a personal connection to.

Haven Golf is a story about what becomes possible when someone with the right combination of work ethic and risk tolerance takes a bet on themselves, doesn't overthink, and figures things out along the way. Gage Benevento had a $200,000 job he could have kept forever. He chose to build something instead and just three years later is running his multi-million dollar brand full-time.

"Break it into small chunks. If you look at starting a business as a whole, it's very overwhelming. It can sound like a lot. But if you just tell yourself, week one I'm just gonna reach out to 10 different manufacturers and see what they say, then start there. And then once the ball gets rolling, momentum is your best friend and you'll get motivated. You just gotta start.

To hear Gage tell the full story in his own words, watch the long-form Bit of Business interview on YouTube - Watch Now