Pluto's Big Bang: Plotting A Street And Golf Culture Collision Course

Forbes

28-04-2025

Boy Pluto, the Indianapolis based brand's mascot tees off
Indianapolis is better known as a Midwest motorsports mecca and basketball bastion than a city built for golf sickos. It's home to Brickyard Crossing, where four holes are plotted inside the track that hosts the Indy 500 and Brickyard 400, and where Larry Bird's legend began and where Caitlin Clark currently packs Gainbridge Fieldhouse with her long-range swishes. But a pair of smooth-swinging diehards—Quentin Purtee and Leen Dhillon, the brain trust behind Pluto Golf—are determined to expand their hometown's sports narrative, building a golf brand aimed squarely at sneakerheads like themselves while uplifting Hoosier State creative talent along the way.
Purtee and Dhillon became instant friends as freshmen at Indiana University in Bloomington, bonding the moment they crossed paths and realized they were basically dressed as each other's reflection.
'Literally, the first week we get to campus, we see each other and we're both just wearing clothes that people in Indiana don't normally wear—Supreme, Bape, Jordans,' Purtee said. 'That was in 2012 at the peak of that era. I was into shoes and super into streetwear.'
Their shared taste in sneakers wasn't just a casual hobby—it bordered on obsession. They shared a mutual appreciation for Nike SB Dunks, retro Jordans, and the signature kicks Kobe Bryant, Tracy McGrady and Allen Iverson sported in their primes. They can nerd out at great length over toe box design or low top ankle support with the verve and gravitas of an art critic waxing deep on fauvism.
Purtee jokes that his future Pluto co-founder was way more invested than anyone he knew.'I think he had $500 in his bank account and maybe $100,000 worth of sneakers,' Purtee said. 'I didn't have 200 pairs of shoes like Leen had, I was in the 15-to-20 range.'
While the monetary heft of Leen's collection might be hyperbole, Dhillon doesn't deny that his paychecks were basically spoken for before they even cleared.
Since he was a teenager, Dhillon was driven to get a foot in the door of the footwear industry. At 16, he landed his dream job when the Indianapolis location of Nike's House of Hoops—a joint retail venture with Foot Locker—opened up shop.
'At the time I didn't think it was a big deal,' Dhillon recalled. 'But in hindsight, looking back, it was a big moment for me. I got to see how the retail side of footwear worked and understand a lot about insoles, shoe sizes and seeing buyers come in and what their eyes are drawn too—which inevitably played a part in how we view shoes today.'
Even though they both shared expensive taste, both had modest means. 'Neither of us come from any sort of money and have never taken a dime from our parents. We were just broke and thought we got to figure this out, and just grinded. It wasn't with the end goal of starting Pluto but with an eye to getting out of the rat race,' Purtee explained.
Both gravitated toward tech sales straight out of college. Purtee, who moved to L.A. for a stretch, worked for PatientPop and ServiceTitan, while Dhillon held sales and marketing roles at Angie's List and Salesforce before eventually starting his own roofing company. When they'd raised enough capital to build the foundation for a brand, they punched in the launch sequence to get their golf fashion label off the ground.
In the same way Eastside Golf's hoodie and flying Cuban-links-clad emblem made an instant statement on the scene, Pluto's Boy Pluto logo—which feels like Hebru Brantley's Flyboy character collided with Elroy Jetson's retro-futuristic mug and then crash-landed somewhere between a clubhouse and the halfpipe—blends street and fairway culture into spikeless golf shoes as comfortable stepping into a bunker as they are flipping a board. But Pluto isn't just a footwear concern; it's evolving into a full head-to-toe apparel name—their latest drop was rain gear.
'We're not competing with brands who make breathable polos,' Purtee explained. 'If that's what you like, more power to you—but there are 25 companies doing a great job of that. What differentiates us isn't just the product—it's the perspective. We're our own customer.'
'We're not trying to impress fashion designers,' he added. 'We're trying to make clothing that we want to wear and our friends want to wear. And with that mindset, I think there are more possibilities in what we can do.'
The spacy upstart has been leaning into storytelling and creative to carve a niche as well as reaching out directly to a large cast of smaller influencers—including Hood Hood Golf, Zion Wright, Sushiboy Mexico and Indiana University alum and PGA Tour Americas player Noah Gillard, all drawn to Pluto's style and eager to be part of the growing' brand's narrative. Celebs who have posted Pluto include retired New York Giant Victor Cruz and actor Ross Butler.
Closeup of Pluto's P1 sneakers
Pluto Golf quickly realized that bypassing intermediaries and reaching out to influencers personally was crucial for building momentum, all while keeping their marketing budget in check.
'I talked to a PR agency who told me it's going to be a $7500 a month retainer, and with influencer and NIL agencies it was the same thing' Purtee explained.
Instead, they set about creating a brand that would attract authentic partnerships organically—a lesson they believe most D2C upstarts in their space could benefit from.
"Focus on something really cool that you like, that your friends like,' Purtee . 'If it is really cool, it's going to come to you—you don't have to be too eager. If you've got millions of dollars to blow, be my guest. But if you're coming to this industry cold, be personable. All these people are friendly, they all like cool stuff, they all like golf.'
Leen adds, 'being in sales has taught us to be comfortable being uncomfortable—reaching out to new people and knowing how to build real connections.'
After some trial and error themselves, they moved away from agencies altogether. Leen said it became clear that intermediaries, aside from being expensive, often muddied the process.
'If you're bootstrapping a business, the more you can do yourself and the more outbound you can do without bringing in outside agencies, the more benefit you'll have long-term,' he said. In their experiences with middlemen, they also found it simply too easy to get cut out of the mix—whether it's never getting properly introduced to an influencer or even not getting genuine feedback on product.
'A lot of them gatekeep relationships in fear of themselves getting cut out,' Leen explained.
Forging those direct lines of communication has helped the brand create more authentic partnerships. 'We're transparent behind the scenes,' says Purtee. 'We tell people what's going on and they're excited for the future. It's like this perfect concoction that's definitely hard to tap into.'
Still, Leen emphasizes the hustle behind their content creator outreach is a grind: 'It's a lot of weekend work, a lot of evening work. Maybe somebody else is watching TV and you're doing this instead."
While the small-influencer capture strategy hasn't sparked a viral moment yet, it has helped fuel steady growth. 'It's more of a compound effect than any specific micro-instance that we can point to so far,' he explained.
Pluto Golf isn't just a passion project—it's a moonshot. They're not content to play around the fringes of golf fashion—they feel they have an irreverent, youth culture focused brand that they can scale into major player in the game in the space of a decade.
Pluto may currently be a dwarf planet on the golf apparel sales leaderboard, but if the brand stays on the current trajectory, the future could be stellar. They're swinging big, aiming high, and betting that style, storytelling, and beast-mode level hustle can put them into orbit.