TaylorMade Kalea Gold women's set: What you need to know

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW: TaylorMade's new Kalea Gold line is a 10-piece set designed specifically for women. The line builds on its predecessor, Kalea Premier, and features upgrades in both cosmetics and technology in an effort to elevate the experience for female golfers.

AVAILABILITY/PRICE: Aug. 20. Available as a 10-piece set including a driver, fairway wood, 6-hybrid, 7-iron through pitching wedge, sand wedge, putter and choice of stand or cart bag. The set retails for $1,900.

THE DEEP DIVE: When designing Kalea Gold, TaylorMade’s R&D team focused on making the new iteration a substantial improvement over Kalea Premier. “Our research showed we were starting to get that second- or third-set consumer,” said Michelle Penney, TaylorMade's principal engineer of product development. “To appeal to them we needed to utilize the menu of technologies that TaylorMade has to pick from and use them intelligently.”

Before heading down that path, however, Penney—who previously worked solely on men’s clubs—needed to better understand the audience.

As such, TaylorMade designers collected input from various women’s constituencies, including a Women's Advisory Board of industry professionals across Europe along with a company-wide Women's Golf and Social Club, women's perception test panels and online reviews. The feedback led to refining the line's aesthetics and design.

On the aesthetics, the feedback was clear: feminine was desirable but girly was not. “It was important to realize the difference,” Penney said. “Feminine I liken to a little black dress while girly is a little pink dress. That distinction was important.”

The Kalea Gold set starts with a driver that has a carbon crown and face. The carbon construction created a mass savings of several grams, which allowed for the introduction of an adjustable hosel (allowing for loft alterations up to 2 degrees) along with a weight that helps enhance draw bias. The driver comes in two standard lofts: 11.5 degrees and 13.5 degrees with a 44-inch Kalea Gold Ultralite 40-gram L-flex graphite shaft.

The fairway woods feature a wrapped carbon crown and a “Speed Pocket” on the sole. That couples with the company’s hallmark inverted cone variable face thickness that helps keep ball speed up on off-center shots. The fairway woods are available in three lofts: 3-wood (16 degrees), 5-wood (20 degrees) and 7-wood (24 degrees). Whereas men’s fairway-wood lofts only have three degrees of separation, slower swingers tend to have more condensed yardages, leading to the four-degree gapping. The hybrids offer the same technologies as the fairway woods and maintain the same four-degree loft gapping: 23 degrees for the 4-hybrid, 27 degrees (5-hybrid), 31 degrees (6-hybrid) and 35 degrees (7-hybrid).

The iron set is built for forgiveness thanks to a cap-back design, where mass from the high toe area is removed to expand the unsupported face area for more ball speed and to increase the size of the club’s sweet spot.

In addition, for the first time in the Kalea line, an echo damper helps reduce unwanted vibrations while allowing for the face to flex. The top lines are thinner for a sleeker look at address while still providing game-improvement forgiveness while the lie angles are slightly upright in the 6- through 9-irons to promote a draw bias.

The set also includes a 33-inch, L-neck, Spider Tour S putter. The navy and gold mallet has 3 degrees of loft. The putter has 60 grams of tungsten weight on the sole and backbar for added stability.

“Although I wouldn't call it new territory, clubs for women are not as discovered territory as our global in-line products,” Penney said. “It's kind of fun to solicit all this feedback and try and learn from it because it gives you confidence that you're going in the right direction. That’s important because it’s more of an open canvas. For me, it’s not only getting to design products for women, but being able to cross into this new territory and really spend time to hear what this consumer wants. We're making the rules for the women's products, which is so much fun.”