Jonas Mårtensson spent a decade building Minecraft into one of the world’s most popular video games. Less than a year into his new career as general manager of LIV’s Cleek Golf Club team, Mårtensson is pursuing a long-term plan to apply lessons from the gaming world to make Cleeks one of the most prominent brands in sports.
“It’s about building communities. We managed to build a fairly big community with Minecraft,” Mårtensson said on a video call from his base on Spain’s Costa del Sol. “This is a completely different beast, and we’ll have to do it very differently. … You want to build something people can identify with, I think that’s the correlation.”
Mårtensson is used to building brands consumers connect with. His first venture was co-founding Happy Socks, a maker of playful socks and underwear that was sold to private equity in 2017. He also served 11 years leading Minecraft, a creatively open “sandbox” game that has sold more than 300 million copies and is believed to have more than 200 million monthly active users. The executive left a post-CEO position as advisor at its Microsoft-owned publisher Mojang in September, having taken over last summer as GM of Cleeks, one of LIV Golf’s 13 teams.
“Brand—and consumption—is about identity, really. You consume to be part of something or to get to where you want to be,” he said. Though Cleeks Golf Club is his first time working on a sports team, he has a specific inspiration in the field for what he envisions with Cleeks. “In Europe there are a lot of people running around with New York Yankees caps. They don’t really know it’s a baseball team, but they like the brand and the lifestyle vibe that they have built into that brand.”
The lifestyle aspect of the Cleeks brand is one of the early points of emphasis for the executive, who has collaborated with fashion designers and artists who can expose the franchise to a younger, hipper audience than that of traditional golf. And LIV Golf needs all the good associations it can get, given its controversial support from the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia—“a very good financial backer,” Mårtensson said—and long-simmering tensions with the PGA Tour.
On Wednesday in Miami, to help launch LIV Golf’s Miami Week, Cleeks is opening a collaboration with Jacob Felländer, a Swedish painter and photographer. Cleeks is sponsoring an exhibit of his at Superblue Miami, a large art space where VIPs will attend an opening night celebration of the exhibit.
The next three days will have Felländer’s art exhibited on Trump National Doral golf course, the site of a LIV competition. They will also feature players wearing Cleeks merchandise emblazoned with the focal piece of art Felländer created for the week—merch that is also for sale to fans—as well as team member Martin Kaymer showing off a golf bag custom-painted by the artist for the tournament.
“It’s a way of integrating art and making the brand interesting and also inviting new audience to golf,” Mårtensson said.
The collab dovetails with his brand motto for Cleeks of “tradition refreshed.” He connects the tagline to his own experience with golf: He said his father’s best influence on him was introducing him to the game, which he has loved since childhood. “It’s not like we want to come in and do something completely new which changes golf from the ground up,” he said. “[But] we realize we are in a new era where we want to invite people to the brand.”
It’s not new to have a celebrity lend his or her renown to a brand—Felländer has collaborated with Apple and H&M previously. And even golf has had plenty of artistic tie-ins. Last decade, for example, LeRoy Neiman did a commission for the Ryder Cup.
But Mårtensson wants his partnerships to be organic. Felländer played golf at Florida’s Flagler College and is friends with Johan Elliot, founder of Sportyard, an athlete representation firm of mainly golfers. He also had Felländer meet with the team in Europe last year to work with them on creativity. Players went in skeptical but left enthusiastic with the experience, he said, adding, “I just don’t want to do things for the hell of it.”
The collabs are just in their early stages. In February, Cleeks partnered with Martin Key, a designer who owns a leatherworks factory in Sweden. Key created a limited-run weekend bag that sold for $4,800. Later this year, among the planned partnerships is one with The Rookies, a platform for promoting next-generation digital artists. That will launch next month, when LIV Golf’s circuit goes to Korea.
The logic behind the partnerships isn’t just about raising Cleeks’ profile, though he said LIV Golf data shows such efforts are drawing a younger, more diverse audience than golf traditionally has enjoyed. Merchandise sales, often buoyed by collaborations, are one of the key potential pillars of LIV Golf club revenue along with sponsorships and prize money.
While Cleeks is arguably top of the leader board in branding in the LIV circuit, the results on the course probably aren’t of the level Mårtensson wants to see long-term. The Yankees aren’t a ubiquitous fashion item on the strength of a cool logo alone. Winning matters. Cleeks Golf Club’s best finish in four tournaments this year is sixth after finishing eighth overall in the 13-tournament 2024 season.
Still, early results are transitory. “The only thing that is going to be forever is the brand,” Mårtensson said. “We did it with Minecraft, and I’m hoping to do it with Cleeks now.”
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