Latest news with #Purtee
Forbes
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Pluto's Big Bang: Plotting A Street And Golf Culture Collision Course
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.
Yahoo
11-02-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Concerns about historic south side cemetery upkeep
SAVANNAH, Ga. (WSAV) — A woman said that she has not been able to visit the graves of her parents in a historic Black cemetery because the only road to get there has been inaccessible. Linda McKee's parents are buried in Cedar Grove Cemetery in the Coffee Bluff neighborhood. Last week she and her family could not drive down the approximate mile of dirt road to get inside, not allowing her to visit her father's grave on what would have been his 105th birthday. Since before Hurricane Helene, McKee told News 3 often times the sole road that leads from Coffee Bluff Road to the inside of the private cemetery is obstructed. 'There were large trees in the road,' said McKee. 'Trees had overgrown, brush had overgrown, which made it truly unacceptable and inaccessible.' The anniversary of her father's birthday on Feb. 5 was her last straw. 'I love my parents, especially my father, and that's what's really got me fired up, my dear daddy, God bless his soul,' said McKee. 'We weren't able to get to him. I cried that night because I couldn't get back here to him. I felt like I had failed him in some way.' After months trying to figure out who to contact to clear the road, she finally contacted Alderman Kurtis Purtee last week, and Monday, Feb. 10, the road was clear. 'I appreciate Mr. Purtee doing some things, or the city, or whoever moved so fast to move those trees out of the road,' said McKee. Purtee told News 3 the City of Savannah is responsible for half of the road, and the other is private property, owned by Mt. Hermon Baptist Church who also runs the cemetery. Purtee said he is working with cemetery owners to make sure the road and the inside of the cemetery remain clean, and that he will visit the cemetery again Tuesday. 'I've gotten with city staff, and there are things the city can do as we work with owners to have that taken care of, and I was assured that it would be,' Purtee told News 3. To ensure the road stays clear, McKee said she is trying to form a committee of people in the community or those who own plots to help oversee cleanup and maintenance efforts especially when it comes to the road. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
