"The Husbands Can Be a Plus One": Inside Byrdie Golf's Masters Week Soiree.

AUGUSTA, Ga. — Between practice rounds, the Par 3 Contest, pressers, and other Masters Week-related affairs, the greatest week in golf is also a busy one. Events and activations are popping up all over town, and local businesses are hosting shindigs to welcome out-of-towners to their homes. There's something to do every second of the day. But what about player families? Where do the wives and girlfriends hang out before competition begins?

Rachelle Wates and Hayden Hendrix of Byrdie Golf Social Wear asked the same question and created an event to host the WAGs for a morning of light shopping, a little bubbly sipping, and a whole lot of socializing.

Just down the road from Augusta National, at Augusta Country Club, Fairway Fête was a morning just for the girls.

We got to hang around Wates and Hendrix while they displayed their very best southern hospitality to the partners of the best golfers in the world. From Scottie Scheffler's mom Diane and wife Meredith to TikTok icon Alayna Finau—the WAGs showed out Tuesday morning and we caught up with the Byrdie founders to learn about why bringing women together during such a coveted week isn't just important, but needed.

Q: Set the scene. Why Augusta Country Club?

Augusta is an extension of Charlotte and where we grew up in North Carolina. So, ultimately, it's a place where we feel right at home. [We] feel like southerners, your home is like your dwelling ground, but also where you welcome the people that you love the most into your space. This is how we're treating this event. It's like, truly the people that we love and adore, just really celebrating them, celebrating history, but also making history at the same time.

Q: This is a sort of a sip and shop experience, but how's it different than other trunk shows?

This was made to feel like us, Rachel and Hayden, and our extension of our family at the same time. Having a pianist in the background, windows open, feels like you're at home, these little touches along the way. So many of these shopping events feel so manufactured, we said "let's hardly bring inventory", like let's not make it about the clothes. Let's make it about the people. Let's make it about the women, the connections that we're making. So, an extension of our home and community is the big part of what we wanted to celebrate today.

Q: The theme of the event is "socializing is a sport". What does that mean for Byrdie?

Byrdie, as a brand, the bulk of our clients aren't playing golf in it [the clothes], so it becomes, how does Byrdie exist in the world outside of golf? And then we kept on coming back to, we are socializing, like that's like our event, and every weekend is like a sport for us because we love getting dressed up, whether it is on the course or if we're at the club or we're just hanging with girlfriends. Socializing is what we always came back to. It's like, we are always out and about. We are always with friends, family in the community.

Q: How does that manifest during Masters Week?

The Masters is our Super Bowl. It all keeps coming back to lifestyle. Like, what is the lifestyle and why are we doing what we do? And yes, it is to bring women into this inviting golf space, but it's so much more than that. And that looks like hosting and making sure it [the brand] is lifestyle 360 and not just pushing a product for golf. It's how does it live beyond the course.

Q: How important was it for you to pull in the thread of pulling in wives and female family members of these athletes?

Honestly, this whole event started with our guest list. We were like, if we can't get this audience, like, what is the point? We were so hyper-focused on the outreach of this event and it was so important for us because we wanted to really just make sure that we flip the narrative and the husbands can be a plus one instead of the other way around.

If we could create this at every tournament for ladies to get really jazzed about just being on the scene, going to these practice rounds, but also getting really excited about what they're wearing every single day of the week, versus just showing up for a Sunday round and just kind of ticking the box. How can we be more intentional throughout the whole entire week? And then the best part, too, is you're meeting new people, and then you see them throughout [the week]. The community building and networking is so evergreen.

Q: We're coming off the heels of ANWA, how does that inspire you as a women-focused brand?

These girls are so much younger than all the men that compete the week after. This younger generation, they're not intimidated by the space like we were growing up. Growing up, we looked at the people around us, for us it was our grandparents who we were playing golf with and now this younger generation has more women who are closer in age to engage with.

The gap has closed a bit and things are way more seamless than probably past generations. Just because now social media plays a huge part of it. Girls are seeing more with the sport and with the fashion in the sport that we didn't have that previously.

Q: Do you think ANWA has made things more accessible and approachable?

Growing up, no one was young for us to look up to in the golf space. So it's just naturally becoming less intimidating, more inviting, because we're starting with this really young, hip group of kids who are like "we're here, we're not intimidated, we're really excited about the sport" and they're really confident.

Seeing all the content that came out of the tournament last week, everyone was so young and energetic. In the past, like you just never saw that, it was never televised, that was never broadcasted in any sort of way, like it was just such a sport for older folks and it's just not the case anymore. So we hope Byrdie helps bridge that gap, too.

Photography by Sam Stamey