Formatting USB sticks to exFAT

Hello community,

Have a problem that I can't quite figure out and would like your input. I purchased a PNY 128GB USB stick for the purpose of transferring large (>4GB) files. Problem is the USB stick cannot handle files >4GB as is and has to be formatted to exFAT. So, I placed the USB stick in my MAC (running High Sierra 10.13.2), it pops up on desktop, I click Disk Utility, select the USB stick, click erase and in that popup I can rename the USB stick and select exFAT from the drop down menu. What happens is a progress box opens where I see the utility is "erasing" the USB stick. Then an error message with the red stop sign appears saying "Erase process has failed. Click Done to continue." When I down-arrow the details, it says: unmounting disk, POSIX reports: the operation couldn't be completed. Invalid argument, Operation failed...

Now when I remove the USB stick and place it back in the computer, it's not even recognized and doesn't show up on my desktop. Running disk utility I can see the USB stick and select it and attempt to erase it again and the same error message shows up. The partition button (it's a button now, no longer a tab as in previous OS systems) is not highlighted and cannot be selected. It never was available to be selected from the beginning. It also says the disk in unmounted and when I select the mount button, nothing happens.

This is my second USB stick (other is Lexar 128GB) that this happened to and now they're both rendered useless because of this. Really hoping someone has some insight and it's something simple that I'm missing. Thank you.