prepared for
confidential · for the malbon team only
The content engine for TikTok and Shorts. Built so it never stops, never guesses, and never shoots anything only once.
The problem is not the content. It is what happens after it.
"Creating the content is less a concern than the actual deployment of the content in a logical and always-on approach."
This document is that sentence, built.
Everything has made to date was built social-first for Instagram. Cinematic, considered, longer, designed for a feed that rewards exactly that. It worked on the feed it was built for. It was never going to work on TikTok, because TikTok is not that feed.
The Jimmy voiceover piece is the clean proof. One asset, one placement, twelve thousand views. The instinct behind your note is right: that footage carried more than one video's worth of value, and we shipped it as one video.
Ten cutdowns will not each independently produce twelve thousand views. Distribution does not multiply that cleanly, and anyone who says it does is selling something. What ten cutdowns actually buy is ten separate draws at the algorithm instead of one, each with its own hook, its own audio, its own entry point, its own audience test.
Roughly three quarters of TikTok reach arrives through the For You page rather than followers. The number of independent attempts is the single largest variable you control. One asset gets one draw. Ten cutdowns get ten, and the winners tell you what to make more of.
IG-native creative carries the wrong DNA onto TikTok. Slow builds, muted-friendly edits, letterboxed frames, text-heavy cards, brand polish. TikTok's own research penalizes every one of those, and Instagram now actively suppresses anything that reads as a repost from somewhere else.
Right now content is made when a camera team is on site. Between events the channels go quiet, and quiet is the one thing an always-on channel cannot survive. Meanwhile every store, every registered player and every ambassador is already carrying a camera and already living the brand daily.
No system tells the channel owners what publishes, where, when, or in what order. Footage lands on orphaned links from previous teams and dies there. A year of paid-for material is unfindable, which means it is currently worth nothing.
Five stages. It does not wait for a shoot.
This is not a shoot schedule. It is a standing operation that turns a constant flow of raw, lo-fi, field-shot footage into publish-ready, platform-native assets, and hands them to the person who owns the channel.
Malbon publishes. We hold no standing access to any account. We deliver publish-ready and scheduled, and the named channel owner pushes it live. The single exception is the live event window, where within-the-hour turnaround needs temporary access we hand back when the event closes.
The Paid tab sets out the full requirement and all six figures. The Investment tab opens every line: what the build covers, everything each retainer includes, and what stays quoted separately.
Use the tabs at the top, or start here.
Happy to walk any of this through with the team, or answer whatever needs answering before it goes anywhere.
Capturing more content is the easy half. The half that decides whether any of it works is how it gets cut, for which platform, and in what order.
This is the expertise the retainer is actually buying.
Not editing hours. Knowing precisely how a cut has to differ by platform, and building templates so that difference gets executed the same way every single time.
The hook is the whole game. TikTok's own research puts ninety percent of recall impact inside the first six seconds, with the proposition landing in the first three. A cutdown that opens on a four-second establishing drone shot has spent its entire recall budget on scenery.
Length tiers we build to: sub-15 for pure hook and trend, 15 to 34 seconds as the completion sweet spot, 35 to 60 for narrative, one to three minutes only where the story earns it.
Lo-fi is the higher-performing option, not the compromise. TikTok's first-party data shows lo-fi production delivering seventy-six percent higher uniqueness, thirty-three percent stronger consideration, thirty-two percent higher brand likability and twelve percent higher purchase intent against polished creative. That number is what makes the store-staff and player-shot layer strategically correct rather than merely cheap.
Sound-first, because eighty-eight percent of users say sound is vital. Native captions at five to ten words per second. Faster scene changes early. At least one hashtag, which lifts views around five percent on this platform specifically. No watermarks, ever.
Up to three minutes, vertical, 1080p. Recency is weighted more heavily in the Shorts feed than anywhere else on YouTube, which rewards a daily cadence over a batched weekly dump.
The structural advantage over TikTok: YouTube explicitly carries topic and channel signal across formats. Shorts viewing feeds long-form recommendations and back again. This is the one platform where the cinematic work and the lo-fi work compound each other instead of competing.
We count it differently and we say so. Since March 2025 a Shorts view registers on play or replay with no minimum watch time. Shorts views and TikTok views are not the same unit and will never appear on the same chart in anything we hand you.
Reels must be three minutes or under to be recommended beyond followers. Average watch time across the platform sits around eight and a half seconds, which is the number that should drive every edit decision.
Hashtags invert here. On Instagram they correlate with roughly thirty percent fewer views and interactions, the exact opposite of TikTok. Same cut, different metadata, every time.
Meta now runs a five-second nonskippable ad after organic Reels over sixty seconds, which is a structural argument for keeping brand Reels under a minute. Instagram has also raised original-content prevalence in recommendations to seventy-five percent, so cross-posted watermarked exports are actively suppressed. Every platform gets its own export.
Five hundred million monthly actives as of Meta's Q2 2026 call. Video engagement runs roughly double text there, the widest format gap of any platform, and most brands are still posting text. Replying to comments produces around a forty-two percent lift, the highest anywhere measured, and almost nobody does it.
The honest read: this is a community and conversation play, not a distribution play. It costs almost nothing because the assets already exist, and the reply behaviour is exactly what Buckets Club is built for.
Before a single cut ships, the kit gets built and locked, so every asset out of the portal looks like one brand regardless of which of the four channels it feeds or who cut it.
Locked typeface set and weights, caption styling, safe-area rules per platform.
Palette per property. Home, Cup, Future Buckets and ambassador cuts each read distinctly while staying Malbon.
Logo lockups, placement and scale rules, event and sponsor treatments.
Standing destination logic per channel and per moment. Where a viewer goes and what they do next.
Chambers Bay, the Cup stops, the Home activations and the collabs get shot exactly as they are now, cinematically, for Instagram and for the long-form YouTube spine. That work is good and it stays. What changes is what happens on day two.
Every frame of it, including everything already in the back catalogue, goes into the portal tagged and searchable. The event stops being a deliverable and becomes inventory. Then our editors cut it a second time, from scratch, for TikTok and Shorts. New hooks, new lengths, new audio, native captions. Not a trim of the Instagram version. A different film from the same footage.
One event day currently produces seven finished pieces.
Run through the engine, that same day's footage produces those seven plus weeks of afterlife, deployed daily across four channels, while the field supply from stores, players and ambassadors carries every day in between.
That is the rhythm. Events spike the supply. The always-on layer holds the floor. The portal makes both of them findable forever, so month nine can pull from month one without a single person remembering where it went.
Organic finds what works. Paid puts money behind it.
Posting a hundred things a day is not just distribution. It is the cheapest research you will ever run.
Every day the engine runs, the feed tells us something true. Which hook held people. Which length finished. Which store, which player, which face. Nobody has to guess and nobody has to argue about it, because the number is right there by lunchtime.
When a piece breaks out organically, that is a signal worth acting on the same week, not the next quarter. We flag it to your paid team with the asset, the cut, the hook and the numbers attached, so they can put spend behind something already proven rather than something a room hoped would work.
Most brands run organic and paid as two teams looking at two dashboards. Here they share one supply. The always-on engine becomes the testing ground, and paid becomes the amplifier on whatever earns it.
We are not asking to run your media. We are asking to be the reason your media buys get better inputs, and to be in the room the week a piece pops rather than reading about it in a monthly deck.
Engine health first. Then performance.
Uploads per supply line per week. Days of consecutive cadence per channel. Time from upload to publish-ready. Percentage of scheduled slots filled. These say whether the machine is running before they say whether it is winning.
Retention through six seconds. Completion by length tier. Views from For You versus followers. Follower growth per channel. Winning format and hook, ranked, weekly.
Which pillar, which source, which length, which hook. Every week the answer sharpens and goes back to the field, so the capture bank stops being a guess.
Shorts views and TikTok views are counted differently by the platforms and will never sit on the same chart. Each platform reported against itself, honestly.
Happy to walk any of this through with the team, or answer whatever needs answering before it goes anywhere.
The yield being lost today, what the platforms actually reward, the arithmetic that sets the daily target, where golf as a category actually is right now, and the baseline this runs at.
Before anything about volume, posting or platforms, there is a simpler number worth looking at. Malbon already spends heavily to put crews, talent, locations and travel in the right place. The footage exists. The question is how much of it ever reaches an audience.
Both were shot well. Both were expensive. Neither was a production failure. What is missing is the layer that turns a shoot into inventory instead of a single deliverable.
The expensive part of a piece of content is getting the camera to the moment. Crew, talent, location, travel and time are spent once, and they are spent whether the footage yields one asset or fifty.
Every cut after the first carries only an editorial cost. That is the whole argument for this engine. Not more shooting. More of what has already been shot, reaching an audience instead of sitting on a drive.
There is a real limit on how much any single account should publish in a day, and it is not a matter of taste. Posts published inside a few hours of each other compete for the same audience, and rapid-fire publishing on one handle can be read as automated behaviour and suppressed.
Accounts that space posts three to four hours apart see roughly 22% higher engagement per video than accounts posting hourly. Analysis of 200+ brand accounts, Koro, 2026.
Above this on a single handle, additional posts largely cannibalise the audience the earlier ones are still reaching.
Volume is not achieved by posting more on one account. It is achieved by having more places worth posting to, each running at its own healthy rate.
Buffer analysed 11.4 million TikTok posts across 150,000 accounts. The finding is specific, and it is not the one most people assume.
Median views stayed between 459 and 506 at every frequency. Buffer's own data scientist: posting more helps "mostly because it increases your odds" of a breakout rather than improving the typical post.
Average engagement rate falls as volume rises. Dash Social found brands posting fewer than six times a week show materially higher engagement rate per post. That is true, and it is arithmetic. The denominator grows.
Total reach, follower growth and the ceiling of the best posts all move the other way. Which makes the metric matter more than the number. A programme like this is measured on total reach and count of breakouts, not on average engagement rate. Chasing engagement rate is how brands end up posting less and reaching fewer people.
Four channels, each publishing to TikTok and YouTube Shorts, with Reels and Stories exported from the same masters. Each surface running at the healthy rate, not above it.
Every published post is a platform-specific cut. The same moment becomes a different asset for TikTok than for Shorts, and different again for Reels or a Story. One master routinely yields three to four finished deliverables.
On top of that sit paid variants, assets banked into the library for future weeks, and cuts made for ambassadors to post on their own handles. Production has to run ahead of publishing, or the calendar runs on whatever happened to arrive that morning.
The attention has already relocated, and it is currently being captured almost entirely by individual creators rather than by the brands they wear.
More than 2,300 creators posted golf content in the first half of 2025, a third more than the year before. Golf is being treated as lifestyle and aesthetic rather than as a sport.
Up from 42 million the prior year. The audience is not only there, it is growing quickly, and it skews far younger than the traditional golf audience.
Engagement on Masters content more than tripled and video views nearly doubled. Moments in golf now produce enormous short-form demand, and most of it goes uncaptured by the brands themselves.
Traackr, golf content on TikTok, January to June 2025 against the same period in 2024.
These are live figures from the Meta ad library. How many ads each brand has running at once, and how much new creative they put into the system every week. It is the clearest picture available of what a brand's content operation actually produces, because it is measured rather than claimed.
Live ad library data via Motion. Every one of these brands sells direct and operates physical doors, which is the same shape of business Malbon is running.
The best-resourced brand in golf ships fifteen new pieces of creative a week. Rhoback, a fraction of the size, ships thirty-one. Alo ships eighty-nine.
None of those brands are winning because their individual assets are better. They are winning because they have a machine that produces enough variation for the platforms to find what works, and then they put weight behind it. Golf has not built that yet, and that is the opening.
The same pattern holds on the organic side. The brands publishing at real volume did not get there by adding freelancers or briefing out more work. They built infrastructure, and the output followed it.
Glossy on in-house studios, Dash Hudson category benchmarks. These are beauty brands because beauty built this properly first, not because the category is the comparison.
Sephora's number is a studio. Haus Labs' number is a studio. The million a year they save is not a content saving, it is an infrastructure saving.
That is the distinction worth holding on to. What is being proposed here is not a bigger editing budget. It is a vault Malbon owns, an archive that becomes findable and stays findable, a taxonomy, a portal, a written process embedded in real job descriptions, and a standing team inside your calendar and your Slack. The daily output is what that produces. It is not the thing itself.
Repositioned the business around content and posted an 859% year on year revenue increase. Not a campaign. The storytelling became the product and the product followed it.
Their marketing director: "attention is monetisable. If someone gives you forty-five minutes of their time, they don't just like your brand, they trust you as a channel." Manors earned that with long-form because they have no retail footprint and no roster. Malbon has both, which means the same trust is available through frequency rather than duration.
The structure is the lesson. High-production editorial at the top, mid-tier creators in the hundred to five hundred thousand range providing cultural commentary, and micro-level voices inside the community. Native content built per platform rather than one asset repurposed across all of them.
They also start weeks ahead of a moment rather than reacting to it, which is why their anticipation content earns two to three times the saves and shares of their reaction content. Around Milan Cortina it produced 6.5 million new customers and first place in share of voice among all Olympic sponsors, on less media spend than their competitors. That three-tier shape is almost exactly Malbon Home, Ambassadors and Future Buckets.
Built on community-supplied content and long-term athlete relationships rather than campaign media. The structural detail worth copying: their most visible athlete sits as a creative director, not as a paid face. The roster is not a media buy, it is a supply line. That is the same relationship Malbon already has with its ambassadors and simply has not operationalised yet.
The lifestyle brands Malbon competes with for attention rather than for tee times, Kith and Aimé Leon Dore among them, do not treat a drop as a retail event with photography attached. Every release, store opening, collaboration and activation is a content moment, and the machine that makes it is owned rather than briefed out each time. That ownership is the difference between a brand that shows up constantly and one that shows up when there is a campaign.
Ten stores today with a stated path to thirty-five or more, roughly forty ambassadors, Buckets Cup, Future Buckets, the Club, and years of tournaments, athlete days and campaigns already shot and paid for.
Not more shooting and not better shooting. The layer that turns all of it into finished, findable, deployable inventory every day rather than into a folder nobody opens again.
Build it at ten stores and it scales to thirty-five without rebuilding. Build it at thirty-five and you spend a year catching up to a business that already moved.
From roughly five pieces a day, made for a moment and gone, to thirty a day cut, tagged and available, with everything historical recovered behind it. Some publishes immediately. The rest sits on a shelf the channel owners and the internal social team can pull from on any day, for any launch, in any month. Nothing dies on the vine, because there is finally somewhere for it to live.
Worth being clear before any number appears. What follows prices the always-on organic engine across the four channels. Paid has a different volume requirement, a different specification and a different measurement, so it is scoped and priced separately in the Paid section and then carried inside the same agreement rather than folded invisibly into the figure below.
The organic engine. Every piece of inbound and archived footage cut into platform-correct assets across TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Reels and Stories, for Malbon Home, Buckets Cup, Future Buckets and Ambassadors. The repository, the taxonomy, the deployment briefs, the weekly read and the ongoing management that keeps all of it running.
Paid creative, scoped against the Icons brief and carried inside this agreement as its own figure. Event production and crew, cinematic and brand films, and photography stay quoted per job. The engine feeds all of them from the same masters, and each carries its own requirement and its own number.
Hot Juice is a content production and editorial partner with social expertise. We are not your social media agency. We know how these platforms behave, what each one rewards, how a cut needs to change between Shorts and TikTok, and what is on trend, and we build to that.
What we need from Malbon is direction from your internal social lead: the strategy, the calendar, the brand voice and the deployment schedule. We produce into that strategy and make it executable at volume. The clearer that direction, the better everything downstream works, and that partnership is designed into the monthly rhythm rather than left to chance.
Not a ceiling and not an aspiration. A baseline the engine holds every day, seven days a week, from month one, across all four channels. It comes in two kinds, and the difference between them matters.
Cut for a moment, a platform and a date. Event turnarounds, drops, campaign beats, anything on the calendar, and anything riding a trend while the trend is still live. Built to a specific format spec, captioned, branded, exported per platform and delivered with a deployment brief attached. This is what goes out.
Cut to be ready when you need it. The lo-fi pass. Trimmed, topped and tailed, bumpers on, tagged and filed against the taxonomy. Seventy pieces a week going onto the shelf, largely pulled from the historical archive. Anything not deployed goes back into the category tagged, so we always know what has been cut and what is still waiting. This is what turns the archive from a backlog into a shelf you can shop.
Roughly six hundred priority pieces and three hundred library pieces a month, every month, across the four channels.
Malbon Home, Buckets Cup, Future Buckets and Ambassadors, each publishing to TikTok and Shorts, with Reels and Stories exported from the same masters.
New inbound from the field, and the existing archive being recovered in parallel. The second source means a quiet day in the field is never a quiet day on the channels.
Thirty a day is what gets cut, finished and made ready to deploy. Priority largely goes out on the day. Library banks, and gets pulled for a campaign, a theme week, an event or a quiet Tuesday three months from now.
That distinction is what lets the number be thirty without ever pushing a single account past its healthy rate. The calendar draws from a full shelf rather than from whatever arrived that morning, and the shelf keeps getting deeper the whole time.
When an event lands and priority spikes, library gives a day. When the field is quiet, library carries the channels. Priority is the commitment. Library is the floor underneath it. Building both into the daily number is what keeps the engine steady through weeks that are never actually steady.
The cutting is the visible part, and it is the part that is easiest to count. Underneath it sits the operation that makes thirty a day possible, and all of it runs every month for as long as the engine runs.
A dedicated team assigned to this account, not a queue position. That embeddedness is the difference between a vendor delivering files and a partner who knows what is coming, why it matters and who needs it.
Four months from the kickoff date. Long enough for the system to be built, produce a real read and start compounding on it. Short enough that the decision to keep going gets made quickly, on evidence rather than instinct.
Month one stands the system up. Month two produces the first real read. Months three and four are where the compounding shows, and where the decision to continue gets made on evidence.
The build is front loaded for that reason. The portal, the taxonomy, the trained teams and the SOP are yours from month one, so the infrastructure does not depend on what gets decided at the end.
By agreement at a monthly review, not by renegotiation. If inbound supply is outrunning capacity, if the performance read has identified winning formats we are not producing enough of, or if a channel is running below its healthy rate for capacity reasons rather than supply reasons, the case for more output makes itself.
More output means more editorial capacity assigned, and the fee moves with it. What never moves is the infrastructure underneath: the portal, the vault, the taxonomy, the SOP, the weekly read and the archive work all run identically regardless of the daily number. Those are built once and maintained forever.
Happy to walk any of this through with the team, or answer whatever needs answering before it goes anywhere.
Built from the Icons campaign brief, the paid ads creative guide and the monthly content breakdown, plus the five points Sam confirmed in writing. What the account showed about running without supply, what has to be produced, what it costs, and where every edge sits.
Everything here is built from Malbon's own documents. The Icons digital campaign brief, the paid ads creative guide and the monthly content breakdown, plus the five clarifications Sam confirmed in writing. The requirement is his. What follows is what it takes to supply it.
Paid was quoted separately in the first version of this proposal. At Aaron's direction it now sits inside the same engagement, priced as its own line so the split stays visible. One agreement, one team, one monthly figure with both engines legible underneath it.
Slide nine of the Icons brief is the most useful page in any document either side has produced. It measures, on real spend, what a gap in creative costs. Nothing brought in from outside would make the case more clearly.
More than doubled at account level, with ROAS halved over the same window. In the brief's own words, the account is now paying twice to acquire each order.
CPA growth on the men's top of funnel evergreen campaign. Frequency up 27%, CPM up 8%, click-through down 8% and conversion rate down 35%, all at once.
No new creatives had been introduced into the men's evergreen rotation since then. Existing ads had been live between three and eight weeks while budget pushed harder into the same ad sets.
Nearly every static in the rotation absorbed one and a half to two times more spend with flat or lower click-through and roughly flat purchase counts. The budget went up. The output did not follow it.
The brief identifies the mechanism precisely. A small retargeting pool tolerates high frequency, a prospecting pool does not, and heaving spend into a static roster is where the money goes. That is a supply problem rather than a strategy problem, and it is the one thing an always-on engine exists to solve.
The Icons brief already names Andromeda and GEM, so none of this will be new. It is restated only because it explains why three to eight weeks in rotation is a very different thing than it was two years ago.
Set against ads that had been live three to eight weeks, that is a gap of roughly two to three refresh cycles.
The Creative Diversification Matrix in the Icons brief is a production plan. Eight formats down one axis, seven angles across the other, run separately for men's, women's and dual gender. That is 168 distinct cells of creative intent.
Nothing about it needs improving. What it needs is something capable of filling it every two weeks without the filling becoming the bottleneck. The strategy is finished. The supply line is the missing piece, and that is the only thing this section is about.
Two engines running at once. A core rotation refreshing on a fixed cycle regardless of what else is happening, and a seasonal layer that moves with the drop calendar.
At the high state, 109 genuinely new video concepts a month. Five and a half original ideas every working day, each briefed to a persona, format and angle, then built into 1.8 versions.
Same money buys very different things depending on what is being built. Worth setting out plainly, because the two engines produce different numbers of assets for different reasons, and they are not the same product made at different speeds.
Paid does not draw from the thirty a day. It draws from the same source the thirty a day draws from. One archive, one ingest, one taxonomy, one field habit, one portal, carrying both engines without duplication.
Not one finished asset moves between the two counts. Organic is cut for a feed and a moment. Paid is cut for a hook, a placement and a test. Standing paid up on its own would mean building the archive, the tagging and the supply line from nothing. Running it beside an engine that already has all three is the reason it is affordable at these volumes, and the reason folding it into one agreement costs less than running two.
Video only prices the video count alone. Fully loaded prices video, static, carousel and GIF at the volumes above.
Every price below is paid only. It sits on top of the organic retainer rather than instead of it. The organic engine stays at $11,000 a month for the thirty a day. Paid is a second line, and the combined monthly figure is shown against each option.
When sustained paid volume runs above 245 assets a month, the paid line steps to $20,400 at the following review. The organic retainer stays exactly where it is.
Beyond that, the stated ambition is several hundred assets a month as spend scales. Those steps get sized together at each review against real volume and mix, so none of it arrives as a surprise on either side.
At medium fully loaded, both engines together produce 1,115 finished assets a month. Against the media budget discussed for next year, the whole content operation lands at roughly three and a half percent of spend.
The normal range for creative against media is five to fifteen percent. That places this at the bottom of the range while producing at the top of it. Not the expensive line in the media budget. The one that decides how the rest of it performs.
They are the undefined edges. Three of them are worth settling here rather than discovering in month four, and all three are written to be as good for Malbon as they are for us.
Two rounds per concept rather than per asset is what keeps a 215-asset month from becoming a 600-revision month. It is also where the paid lane differs from always-on organic, where the standard is the format rather than the individual cut.
Eleven drops a month is an average, and averages have peaks. Inside the band nothing changes and nothing is invoiced differently. Above it, additional assets are agreed in advance rather than appearing on a bill.
Malbon clears all talent, footage and music for paid usage and paid media term.
Organic and paid are not the same on this. Footage of staff, ambassadors and events that is fine on an owned channel needs a release and a paid usage term once it runs as an ad, and music is stricter again. TikTok paid is commercial library only. None of it is a creative problem, but it stops a launch cold if it surfaces late.
What we do about it. Every asset in the repository carries a clearance status alongside its delivery status, so at any moment it is visible what is cleared for paid and what is not. Malbon holds the relationships and does the clearing. We make the state of it impossible to lose track of. If you would rather we ran the clearance process itself, that is quoted as its own line and does not sit inside the creative fee.
The Icons roadmap already sets the shape: launch, feedback, consistency, scale. The three states map onto it directly, which makes this a schedule rather than a menu.
Two months at the launch state is how a dedicated team gets built rather than borrowed. Stepping up is a signature at a scheduled review, not a renegotiation.
At medium fully loaded, roughly two and a third people on the paid lane alone, on top of the team already assigned to the organic engine. Dedicated to this account rather than a position in a queue.
The account has never had standing supply, so nobody yet knows which angles carry. Two cycles produce a real dataset, and the seasonal layer then scales against evidence rather than instinct.
The portal, the vault, the taxonomy and the ingest run identically at every state. Built once, maintained throughout, and carrying both engines regardless of the monthly number.
This is the piece that decides whether it works day to day. Everyone touching paid needs to find what they need without asking anyone.
The two-week rhythm is the one set out in the Icons brief. We have adopted it rather than proposed our own, because it is already the right one.
Happy to walk any of this through with the team, or answer whatever needs answering before it goes anywhere.
Where footage comes from, who is accountable for each channel, what the supply can actually carry, and who does the work.
No named owner, no supply.
The engine is only as good as what feeds it. These are the four sources we switch on in the first thirty days, each with a single accountable person on your side.
Daily store life shot by staff on shift. Fits, drops, product landing, the room, the regulars. First Thursdays, launches, collab drops, capsule releases. Buckets Club local meetups whenever the series is in that city. Every upload tagged by store at capture, so each storefront programs as its own micro-feed inside the channel.
Nick briefs registered players ahead of each stop. Fit layouts the night before, arrival, warm-up, the matchup, the after. Players shoot and send. Nothing is edited on their end, the raw file into the portal is the entire ask. Between stops this is the layer that keeps the account alive on the quiet weeks.
Unboxings, fits, capsules and drops as they land. Junior competition, families, the fun of it, shot by the people in it. Awareness content running now, ahead of the 2027 series launch, so the channel arrives with an audience already on it rather than starting cold.
Pro and semi-pro, women's and men's, plus the Future Buckets creator tier. Swings, fit checks, range work, course days, tournament weeks. The celebrity tier too, where one fit check carries reach no owned channel can buy. Everyone already gets product. The ask becomes standing: product goes out, footage comes back.
All four asks go out in the first week, against a shared Drive we stand up on day one using the exact folder structure and naming convention the portal will use. Nobody waits on software to start sending us footage.
When the portal goes live at the end of the build sprint, everything collected migrates straight in, already tagged. The archive starts filling immediately.
Greg, Nick, Klay and William are each confirmed on their line. That matters more than it sounds, because a channel without a named owner does not produce past week three.
What we lock at kickoff is what each ownership actually means day to day: the ask that goes to their people, the volume expected, and the weekly check that the line is still alive. Every owner leaves the kickoff with it in writing.
The supply supports far more than we are scoping. That headroom is the point.
This is a UGC engine. Almost everything that feeds it is shot by someone who already works for you, plays with you, or wears the brand. The volume is not something we manufacture. It is something that already exists and is currently going uncollected.
Roughly seventy percent from UGC inflow, thirty percent from the library and event cutdowns. The seventy is your stores, your ambassadors, your players, your creators and your community. The thirty is footage already shot and paid for, recut for TikTok and Shorts.
That second thirty matters more than it looks, because it is entirely inside our control. It never depends on anyone remembering to send anything.
Fifty-five raw clips yield roughly seventy finished pieces once cut for TikTok, Shorts and Stories. Most clips carry more than one usable moment.
Recut from the existing library and every event we shoot. This runs whether or not a single person uploads anything, which is why it is the floor under the whole model.
The supply can carry a great deal more than thirty. We are scoping editorial capacity at thirty because that is a number the engine holds every single day from week one, and because capacity should follow evidence rather than lead it.
Volume changes what a single piece is for. Some will win, most will do their job, a few will die, and that is the model working rather than failing. The Execution section sets out how that changes the way notes and revisions run.
We cannot promise that a specific ambassador uploads on a specific Tuesday. Nobody can. UGC arrives when it arrives, and pretending otherwise would be the first false note in this document.
What we can promise is the system that makes the volume reachable, the floor that holds when inflow is light, and a number we manage against every week. The number we watch is uploads per supply line. If a line goes quiet, that is an owner conversation the same week rather than a surprise at a monthly review.
Ten stores today and a stated plan for thirty-five to forty-five over the next three to five years. Every one of them is a room full of product, people and moments, staffed by people already carrying a phone. Three clips a day per store is not an ambitious ask. It is a small habit. That single line is thirty clips a day on its own, and it is the part of the model Malbon controls completely.
Store uploads written into the retail manager role, so it is a requirement rather than a favour. And the footage ask added to ambassador agreements, one line, applied from the pro tier down. Neither costs anything. Together they are the difference between an engine that runs on what we can recover and one that runs on what the company produces every day, and they are the highest-leverage moves available to you in this whole programme.
The constraint is not supply. It is hands on keyboards. Once the collection habit is real, the inflow described above carries considerably more than thirty finished pieces a day, and the archive underneath it carries more again.
That is deliberate. We would rather start at a number the engine holds every day without drama, prove what is working, and then add capacity against evidence at a monthly review. Adding an editor is a written amendment and a fortnight of onboarding, not a new proposal. The headroom sits there waiting, and the decision to use it gets made on real performance data rather than on optimism at the start.
A standing unit. Not capacity we allocate.
A standing unit assigned to Malbon and nobody else. Dedicated editorial capacity plus an editorial manager who owns the daily count, the quality bar and the single line of communication to your four channel owners and your social team. Capacity scales by written addendum at a monthly review, so the team grows with the work rather than ahead of it.
Cuts TikTok-first and Shorts-first to template across all four channels. Owns daily queue delivery.
Splits the channel load. Owns event afterlife cutdowns and back-catalogue mining.
Oversees both editors and the workflow. Sets the daily count per channel, runs the portal, holds quality, and is the single line to Greg, Nick, Klay, William and your social team.
Account management, platform strategy, creative direction on the template kit, the weekly performance read, and the relationship. Carried inside the retainer rather than billed as separate heads or hourly.
Event production stays where it is. Travel, on-site crew, gear, extended days and real-time delivery at Cup stops, Home activations and collabs are quoted per event as they are today. The retainer buys the team's month and includes cutting every event's footage into its weeks of afterlife. The event fee puts crew on planes. Nothing is charged twice, and nothing falls between.
Happy to walk any of this through with the team, or answer whatever needs answering before it goes anywhere.
A custom front door onto storage Malbon buys and owns outright. Built for how your teams actually work.
Custom-built for your team. A purpose-made intake and delivery portal with the taxonomy baked in, so nobody has to remember where anything goes.
You own the vault. We build the front door. The archive lives on storage Malbon buys and owns outright. The portal is the interface your teams log into, and it sits on top of that storage rather than replacing it.
This is deliberate. Every frame you have ever paid for ends up on hardware with your name on it, not inside a subscription that ends when a relationship does. You are living the alternative right now, with a year of footage stranded on orphaned links from teams who have moved on. We build the system, we run it, and if we ever part ways you keep everything, organised, tagged and searchable.
The uploader answers three questions and the file routes itself. Store staff pick their store, players pick their stop, ambassadors pick their drop. Metadata captured at upload, not retroactively, which is the single decision that keeps the library searchable forever instead of orphaned in six months. Mobile-first, because the people uploading are standing in a store or on a tee box.
Finished assets come back by channel. Cut, captioned, branded, exported per platform, dropped into the owner's folder. Every delivery carries a deployment brief with placement, sequence, timing, caption direction and audio note. Owner and in-house social are notified the moment the day's queue is ready.
Every frame already shot for Malbon, Chambers Bay, the Cup stops, the Home activations and the collabs gets ingested and tagged into the same taxonomy during the build, including the orphaned links from previous teams. Unfindable, that footage is worth nothing. Tagged, it becomes standing inventory our editors pull from on any day the field supply runs thin. The engine never starts from an empty shelf.
The portal integrates with whatever scheduling platform your in-house team already runs, so approved content lands in the queue rather than requiring a daily manual hunt. The day is loaded before the day starts. The SOP is written by role, published inside the portal, and trained live, because the portal is only half the answer. The other half is everyone knowing exactly what to do with a piece of footage the second it is shot.
One detail worth understanding, because it is the difference between a system people use and one they abandon in week three.
Why not just upload straight to the box. Because a storage system sits on an office network, and every upload would then be limited by that one office's outbound internet speed, which in most buildings is the slowest number in it. If that connection drops, the whole engine stops. Staging in the cloud first means a store associate never waits, a bad signal resumes instead of restarting, and nothing depends on one room staying online. Your team never sees this layer. They see upload, and they see deploy.
Collection does not wait for it. A shared Drive goes up on day one carrying the same structure and naming convention, so your teams start sending footage in week one. When the portal is live, everything migrates in already tagged. The interim step is deliberately simple because the point is momentum, not tooling.
We built a working wireframe before asking you to approve anything, because you should be able to press the buttons rather than read a description of them.
Sign in as any of your team and see exactly what they would see. Greg opens Malbon Home and the other channels are not even available to him. Hit upload, change the three questions, and watch the filename assemble itself on screen. Then look at the deploy tab, where finished cuts arrive already split into TikTok, Shorts and Stories with a button to push the day into your scheduler.
Every screen, every permission, every field is real and decided. This is the design, and it is in front of you before a dollar is spent rather than after.
Nothing behind it is connected. No file moves, no account exists, nothing is stored. It is a rough sketch of the process, deliberately shown early and deliberately unfinished.
Connecting it is the build: your storage, the cloud front door, real logins, the library ingested and tagged, and the sync between them. Four weeks. And the four weeks after that are refinement, because the first version of a system is never the right one. We would rather show you a sketch now and shape it with you than hand you a finished thing you did not get a say in.
three questions, and the file names and files itself. a store associate is in and out in under a minute.
This is not us buying you a subscription to somebody else's software. It is a system built for how Malbon actually works, sitting on storage Malbon owns outright. Custom to your channels, your stores, your events, your people, and shaped further every week it runs.
Which means it cannot be taken away, the archive cannot go dark, and nothing ends up stranded on a link nobody has access to. It also stops being just ours to use. Once it exists it is the company's system of record, and every department can live in it.
Happy to walk any of this through with the team, or answer whatever needs answering before it goes anywhere.
The launch plan, the turnaround commitments, the weekly rhythm, who owns what on both sides, and what success is measured against. This is the part that gets agreed in the room.
Not a TikTok program. The content infrastructure for the company.
The four channels are where we start because they are ready. But the real move is that every piece of content Malbon produces, anywhere in the business, ends up in one system, categorised, searchable and cut for every platform it should live on.
Today a shoot produces a deliverable. Under this model, every shoot produces inventory. Instead of asking how many pieces we need from Augusta this year, the question becomes how many hundreds of pieces this moment can produce across every platform, and that changes how we plan it, how we shoot it, and what we bring to set.
It also means we shoot differently on purpose. Knowing a shoot owes fifty short-form cuts changes the call sheet. iPhones and lo-fi cameras come alongside the cinema bodies, because the fast-turnaround material has to be captured in the moment, not manufactured afterwards.
Each source gets a named owner. Launch channels are live from week one. Expansion sources come in as the system proves out, and adding one is a config entry rather than a rebuild.
Everyone touches one interface. Underneath it sit three layers, each doing a job the others cannot.
On-premise storage Malbon buys and owns outright, configured so two drives can fail without losing anything. Every frame the company has ever paid for lands here permanently. It is not a working drive and nobody edits off it. It is the copy that outlives vendors, staff turnover and platform changes.
Plus an off-site copy. Redundancy protects against a dead drive. It does not protect against fire, theft or a bad delete. The standard is three copies, two types of media, one off-site, and we set it up that way from day one.
The working layer. Uploads land here first because it is fast from anywhere on earth and does not depend on one office staying online. Editors pull from it, deliver back to it, and it syncs down to the vault automatically.
Our recommendation is Dropbox Business over Google Drive for this specific job. Drive is excellent for documents and it is likely where the company already lives, but it handles multi-gigabyte video badly: slow sync, unreliable partial uploads, no frame-accurate review. Dropbox was built for large-file media workflows, it plugs into Premiere natively, and Replay gives your team timestamped comments on a cut rather than notes in an email. If the company is standardised on Google and moving is a real cost, the portal abstracts it either way and we will build against Drive instead. That decision is yours and we will make either work.
The custom interface, built around how Malbon actually works rather than out of a box. Three questions at upload, automatic filing and naming, delivery folders by channel, notifications to the owner. A store associate never needs to know the vault or the cloud exists.
Built around your process, not the reverse. Out-of-the-box tooling is used wherever it saves money and nobody notices. Custom is reserved for the parts your teams touch daily, because that is where friction kills adoption.
Nothing waits for the platform. Week one runs four things in parallel: collection starts, the archive hunt begins, the teams get briefed, and the build kicks off.
Content is flowing in from at least two channels. Editors are producing daily. Every stakeholder knows their job and has it in writing. The archive is being recovered. The September calendar is mapped. The build is underway. Nobody is waiting on anybody.
Systems fail on communication long before they fail on capability. So the rhythm, the channels and the access are designed up front rather than settled into over the first few months.
Our team sits inside your Slack from week one, in channels built per property so conversation stays where the work is. A question about a Buckets Cup cut does not land in the same thread as a Home drop. The editorial manager is one named person, reachable during the day, who owns the answer. Nobody has to work out who to ask.
Kickoff and training happen in the office in Los Angeles, and anyone who cannot be in the room joins on Zoom and gets the same session rather than a recording and a shrug. When the portal launches everyone is trained on it again, by role. Retail managers, player comms, the creator tier, the ambassador roster and the social team each get the version that applies to them.
Content currently lives across Frame, Box, Google Drive and personal drives, which is why finding anything is a project. We consolidate onto Dropbox as the transfer layer, because both teams already run it and it moves large files and small ones without anybody thinking about it.
Anyone who prefers to keep working in Google Drive can carry on. They pass the content through and we handle it from there, whether it arrives as files or as a link. Reconciling all of that into one categorised system is part of the build, and it is the reason the archive stops being a scavenger hunt.
Nobody should have to ask our team every time they need a file. Channel owners get standing folders they can pull from directly, and anyone else can request access or ask for something specific and have it opened up. The working archive stays protected so the structure holds, and the external folders stay current so the people who need content can just go and get it.
There is no ramp inside the number. Thirty finished assets a day runs from the first week and holds every week after it, because the archive is being recovered in parallel with the field switching on. A quiet start in the field does not mean a quiet start on the channels.
Cut for a moment, a platform and a date. Event turnarounds, drops, campaign beats, and anything riding a trend while it is still live.
Trimmed, tagged and filed against the taxonomy. Built so any date can pull from it rather than for one specific date.
Output increases at a monthly review, on evidence, by written amendment. More editorial capacity assigned, fee adjusted, nothing renegotiated.
Three things being true at once, looked at monthly. Inbound supply is outrunning capacity, so footage is queuing rather than shipping. The performance read has identified winning formats we are not producing enough of. And a channel is running below its healthy rate for capacity reasons rather than supply reasons. When all three hold, the case makes itself. When they do not, we stay where we are and say so.
No ambiguity about when something comes back. Every piece of inbound falls into one of five lanes, and each lane has a stated turnaround.
The editorial manager holds one queue and the channel owners can flag into it. If something has to move up, something else moves down, and that trade is made visibly rather than quietly. Nobody discovers on Friday that their content was deprioritised on Tuesday.
Worth being direct about this, because it is where content relationships usually go wrong. An always-on engine is not a hero-content service, and it cannot be run like one. At this volume the unit of quality is the format, not the individual asset.
The asset is wrong against spec. Wrong aspect ratio, wrong caption, wrong logo lockup, a bad cut point, a factual error, the wrong product named. Free, immediate, uncapped. That is simply us not having done the job, and it gets corrected the same day.
The asset met spec and someone wants a different creative choice. On always-on content we do not do this. We do not re-cut approved-to-spec pieces, because at this volume that trades a day of new inventory for a marginal change to one asset. We kill it and cut the next one.
Any channel owner can reject any asset before it publishes. No explanation needed, no charge, no conversation. If Greg does not want a piece running on Home, it does not run on Home.
This is the part that matters. You keep total control over what goes out without spending a single editorial hour to get it. Rejection is free. Re-cutting is what costs, and at this volume it costs the thing you are actually buying, which is inventory.
This is the trade. Feedback on a single asset changes one asset. Feedback into the format bank changes a thousand. Nothing is being withheld here, it is being pointed at the place where it compounds.
Two rounds, consolidated into one set of notes per round, within three business days of delivery. These are the pieces that deserve the attention, and pulling revisions off the always-on flow is exactly what protects the time to give it to them.
Some pieces will win, most will do their job, a few will die. That is not a quality problem, it is how distribution works. Timing, hook, sound, the first frame, what the algorithm was rewarding that week: most of it is decided outside the edit.
The model does not depend on any single asset performing. It depends on enough at-bats that the winners are findable, and on a loop that feeds what won back into what gets shot next. That is the whole reason to move from an event model to an inventory model, and re-cutting yesterday is the fastest way to stop doing it.
Launches and events take priority whenever they land. Underneath them runs a weekly theme structure so that on a quiet Tuesday the editors already know what they are making and the field already knows what to shoot.
Themes run across every channel simultaneously, which is what makes a company-wide theme day possible. Every store shooting the same prompt on the same day produces a genuinely national moment out of ordinary material.
Deployment has to be in someone's job description, not on someone's to-do list. Every day, seven days a week, a named person takes what is in the deploy folder and publishes it with the right caption to the right channel in the right format.
Whether that happens through scheduling software a week in advance or manually each morning matters less than that it is the same person, at the same time, measured on it. This is the single most common point of failure in a program like this, and it is entirely preventable.
Deploy folders filled before owners log on, each delivery carrying its brief. Anything time-sensitive escalates the same day rather than waiting its turn. No meeting attached.
Sent by us at the end of the week. Pieces delivered, uploads per supply line, what performed and why, and what is planned next. Read in five minutes.
The month ahead mapped day by day out of the all-social session. Shoots, launches, themes and volume needs, agreed rather than discovered.
Written. What worked, what did not, what we stop making, and what gets handed to the paid team to put weight behind.
Engine health tells us whether the machine is running. Performance tells us whether it is winning. In that order, because the second is meaningless without the first.
Shorts views and TikTok views are counted differently by the platforms and never appear on the same chart. Each platform is reported against itself.
Systems rarely fail. Plans nobody agreed to fail constantly.
Every failure mode in a program like this is a people-and-process failure, not a technology one. Which is good news, because they are all preventable and we know exactly what they are.
People let things slide when there is no plan, or when the plan exists but nobody agreed to it. When the plan is clear, everyone has seen it, and it is part of the daily job rather than an extra, it runs almost by itself. We take the guessing out by running the same plan every day. That is the whole method, and it is why the SOP work in month one matters more than any single piece of content we make.
Happy to walk any of this through with the team, or answer whatever needs answering before it goes anywhere.
Every line opened up, with what is committed and what is quoted separately called out plainly. Click any row to see what sits inside.
Two numbers, both fixed. What is committed and what is quoted separately is stated in each row.
No hourly rate underneath this and no change orders. Off-spec work is corrected same day at no charge, and any owner can reject any asset before it publishes at no cost.
It carries its own line and its own figure rather than disappearing into the retainer. Event production, films and photography stay quoted per job exactly as they are today. Nothing is quietly bundled and nothing is charged twice.
The storage, the archive, the taxonomy, the trained teams and the SOP are yours regardless of what happens next. That is deliberate.
Because this is an engine rather than a project, and an engine is worth what it learns.
Month one stands the system up. Month two produces the first real read. Months three and four are where the format bank starts to show winners and losers, and where performance history becomes good enough to make leading decisions instead of lagging ones. The build is front loaded so the portal, the taxonomy, the trained teams and the SOP are yours from month one regardless. It is reviewed monthly, so there are four scheduled moments to change course rather than one at the end.
Build fee. $15,000 deposit on signature, $19,200 balance to follow.
Retainer. $11,000 per month beginning on the kickoff date, invoiced at the start of each month, net thirty.
Four month term from kickoff, reviewed monthly. Output can be increased at any review by written addendum, so scaling up is a signature rather than a renegotiation.
Travel for kickoff and training is included. Any additional on-site days requested beyond that are quoted in advance. Event production, films and photography remain quoted per job.
Paid joins this agreement as a second monthly line rather than a second agreement. Recommended at $17,000 a month for the medium state fully loaded, held flat across the four month term. All three states, video only and fully loaded, are set out in the Paid section.
Why it belongs here rather than alongside: both engines run off one archive, one taxonomy, one portal and one field habit, and that layer is built and maintained once. Standing paid up on its own would mean paying for all of it twice. One agreement, one team, one monthly figure with the split visible underneath.
This lets us know where you have landed and gets the agreement and kickoff scheduling moving. The signed agreement follows separately.
Happy to walk any of this through with the team, or answer whatever needs answering before it goes anywhere.
Collection starts in week one, not after the build. Thirty days to ramp and get everyone aligned, then sixty days of running the floor and reading the data.
The most important thing to understand about the first month: we are not asking you to wait while we build. Outreach to your community, your stores and your ambassadors begins in week one, and the footage starts flowing immediately.
On day one we stand up a shared Drive with the exact folder structure and naming convention the portal will use. Your four channel owners get access, the ask goes out to their people, and content starts landing that week.
It is deliberately simple, because a store manager should not have to wait on software to send us a video. When the portal goes live at the end of the sprint, everything collected migrates straight into it, already tagged and organised. Nothing is re-done, nothing is lost, and the archive starts filling from week one rather than week five.
Building, collecting and aligning all at once. Teams trained, owners connected to our editors, footage accumulating, and the first cuts going out on the channels we already have momentum on.
Full daily cadence across all four channels. The portal is live, the SOP is in everyone's hands, and the engine runs without anyone chasing it.
Sixty days of real operating data. What holds attention, at what length, from which source. Enough to decide whether we expand the program or keep it exactly as it is.
Relative to the kickoff call, not to a calendar. Once the agreement is signed we set the kickoff date together and everything locks from there.
Happy to walk any of this through with the team, or answer whatever needs answering before it goes anywhere.