Meet Austen Fitzpatrick

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Austen Fitzpatrick a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Austen, we’re so appreciative of you taking the time to share your nuggets of wisdom with our community. One of the topics we think is most important for folks looking to level up their lives is building up their self-confidence and self-esteem. Can you share how you developed your confidence?

My confidence was developed at a young age. My parents instill confidence in me through positive reinforcement and being firm and direct. I developed confidence through sports, peers and trial and error. I think a lot of my confidence comes from not being afraid to fail at new things. I believe that failure is just part of the learning process and in failure I find the knowledge to have confidence in my next venture.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

Our story is The Marker Locker. The Marker Locker is the first of its kind, patented golf accessory that was designed to organize and keep your ball markers safe and secure. It is a golf accessory that hangs on the outside of your golf bag. It looks like a mini locker, and it hold your ball markers in place and neatly stores them. It holds up to around 12 balls markers both poker chips and magnetics ones. It is completely customizable. We can do designs, logos, teams, names, etc. We have NCAA licensing, and we are in pursuit of pro licensing as well and looking to secure a deal by next year. We primarily sell online direct to consumer, but we will be also expanding into big box retail.

The idea organically happened when I was doing the laundry. I heard my ball marker rattling around and immediately called my two best friends. We came together and formed the idea of The Marker Locker. We are collectively a team of five and our main focus is always doing right by the customer. We’ve been on this journey now for around 2 years. We are excited what the future hold for 2026. We are currently in the process of refining the locker. We are making some exciting, innovative changes and we will also be coming out with a mini version as well. It will be a great offering for our walkers and our junior golfer audience.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

The first and most important thing is developing a team. Make sure that you have a team that works together, has clear communication, and is aligned with what the companies’ goals are. The second thing is make sure that you work with partners that you can trust. Do your research, vet your partners. Whenever possible look to do business with partners that come from a referral. Lastly, don’t be afraid to fail. You will hit bumps in the road, there will be steps backwards, you will get frustrated and face adversity. The key is to not be afraid to get in the race.

I think early on in the journey the most important step is to get started. The world is full of great ideas that never go anywhere because people are too afraid of failure. To get started have the idea, share it with your close friend and family, get a prototype in hand, get random feedback from people that would use it, if it is patentable get it patented and start a campaign on Indigogo or Kickstarter.

How can folks who want to work with you connect?

We are always looking to partner with or collaborate with people who share the same love of golf. The golf community has been such an instrumental part of our success. I think it is a game that truly brings people together on a deeper level. We are always looking to partner with investors. Great partners for us are resorts and pro shops looking to add new products to their catalog. Tournaments that want to add a fun, new product for tee gits are great partners. We also love to work with schools that want to do custom lockers for their golf team. Lastly, we love to collaborate with those individuals that share our vision of The Marker Locker and want to support putting new swag on your bag!

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