The Activation
Chili's Grill & Bar converted the clubhouse at DeBell Golf Club in Burbank, California into a branded 19th-hole experience on August 28–29, serving menu staples alongside two golf-exclusive margaritas — the Transfusion Marg and the Tee Time Marg — while a pro-shop pop-up offered a limited-edition collection co-designed with Rhoback, the Charlottesville-based active-lifestyle apparel brand. The event ran from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. both days and was open to golfers and walk-in guests alike, not just ticket holders.
The choice of a public municipal course, rather than a private or resort property, is deliberate. Brinker International CMO and EVP George Felix framed it plainly: "Chili's is the people's clubhouse, so it only made sense to bring that spirit to the course by building the Chili's Golf Club on a public muni." That positioning — democratic, accessible, anti-aspirational — is consistent with how Brinker has marketed the brand since its value-forward reset. Operators watching Chili's trajectory should read this as another data point in a sustained effort to attach the brand to cultural moments without raising price points.
The Merch Play
The Rhoback X Chili's collection spans nine SKUs priced from $54 for hats to $158 for a Q-Zip pullover, available at rhoback.com/chilis while supplies last. Performance polos anchor the line at $132 (men's) and $96 (women's), putting the collection firmly in the premium-casual segment Rhoback already occupies. For Chili's, the partnership is less about margin and more about earned media: the collection ships with a brand story, a campaign film featuring celebrity cameos, and cross-promotion across both brands' social channels — a distribution method that costs a fraction of a traditional media buy while generating measurable social impressions.
Limited-edition licensed merchandise is not new to the restaurant industry, but the structure here is worth noting. Rather than producing and warehousing inventory itself, Chili's used Rhoback's existing e-commerce infrastructure and fulfillment capability. That approach eliminates inventory risk for the restaurant operator while still generating co-branded visibility — a model that smaller regional chains and independent groups can realistically replicate with emerging apparel or lifestyle brands in their own markets.
What Operators Should Watch
The Chili's Golf Club activation sits at the intersection of two trends gaining momentum in casual dining brand strategy: off-premise experience design and lifestyle brand alignment. As restaurant brands compete for cultural relevance alongside food-and-beverage-adjacent companies — think Stanley, Athletic Brewing, or Yeti — the question for multi-unit operators is where their own brand has authentic permission to play outside the four walls.
For marketing teams and agency partners, the tactical template is straightforward: identify a recurring customer ritual (in Chili's case, the post-round drink), anchor a physical experience to that ritual in a non-traditional venue, and layer in a co-branded product that extends the moment into a purchasable artifact. The campaign film distributed across partner social handles amplifies reach without requiring paid media at launch scale. Chili's has now run this playbook across multiple cultural moments — this golf execution is among the more structurally clean versions. Operators evaluating brand launch packages or experiential strategies should study how the activation was scoped to require minimal operational complexity while producing above-average content output.
For vendors and suppliers in the hospitality marketplace, the Rhoback partnership also illustrates appetite among large chains for co-branded product development with brands that bring their own community and distribution, not just manufacturing capacity.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
