The Man Behind Chervò Design

According to Peter Erlacher, Chief Design Officer , golf wasn’t always his game.

He began his career as a professional athlete, both part of the Italian national ski team as a skier and later as a coach. He considered golf to be a snobby pastime for elderly people, that is, until he was intrigued by the opportunity to try it for himself.

In 1987, Peter Erlacher, after a few rounds of hitting balls around the course, realized that the challenge the game posed for him was causing him to reconsider his stance.

Peter Erlacher was already a co-owner of Chervò, which, at the time, was a successful outdoor skiwear business—derived from his passion for skiing.

Noticing that his fellow golfers would come to the green dressed in outdated, worn clothing that allowed for freedom of movement, Erlacher saw an opportunity. Given his awareness of innovations in sports clothing during the 80s, he was uniquely prepared to pioneer a trend for a golf clothing line, similar to what he’d accomplished with his ski and outdoor lines.

Golf, after all, was a sport played outdoors for many hours on end at all times of the year, and sometimes under extreme weather conditions.

The first product he introduced revolutionized the golf experience—rainwear.

Since golf games often do not stop due to rain, the existing rain gear was too noisy and interrupted a golfer’s smooth swing. Enter, the Chervò AcquaBlock technology.

Erlacher devleped a fabric that was light, silent, and yet fully waterpoof and breathable. The product rocked the industry and catapulted Chervò, and Erlacher, to success in golf.

The Business Mind Behind Chervò

Manfred Erlacher is the strategic heart of the company. While his brother defines the creative and innovative side of the brand, Manfred manages its sales and operations in order to ensure continued financial success. “Manfred’s work is tough and extremely important,” said his brother and business partner Peter, known as “the visionary” of the luxury brand for creative imagination and designs.

Recalling his first steps in the golf industry, Manfred confesses that he started playing golf too late in life to be any good. But a lack of ability has done nothing to curb his passion for the game and his business ideas since building an entire “world” around golf, all of which has been achieved in an impressively short space of time.

“Chervò’s success comes from taking our passion for the game and applying it to what we do best” said Manfred. “We work almost with a competitive spirit to constantly research and develop new technological improvements which define our unique chic-tech sportswear that is used around the world.”

As his role in the company might suggest, Manfred immediately starts talking about numbers. “Probably in Italy, we don’t have the right perception of how big golf actually is,” he said. ”There are more or less 60 million golfers in the world, with 25 million in America and five in Europe, and only 100,000 in Italy. These numbers come from the constant growth the game has experienced in the last few decades. From my point of view, golf is a sport, not a game.”