A Chat With May’s Profile, Suzanne Vlietstra, president of Hobby Horse Clothing Co.

CS: What are the factors that have made Hobby Horse successful?
SV: I really know the market, because I am my own customer. And for whatever reason, there’s never been much serious competition to us. We pretty much occupy this niche by ourselves. There’s a lot of women who have custom shops, and the Internet has really allowed them to proliferate. Like the lady you hire to make a prom dress kind of lady. They tend to be a lot more expensive than we are. And then there’s a lot of nasty, made in Sri Lanka Western wear. And there we are in the middle.
We do three things really, really well: style, value and convenience. It’s fairly obvious to me, but nobody else has mounted a significant challenge to that. Our universe of customers is maybe a million people around the world let’s say. Nobody really knows, but we’ll call it a million people. And they either buy the schlocky Western wear, which isn’t appropriate except for beginner level, or they go to custom, that can cost three, four, five times what ours does. Or they always sit in the middle with this really “nichey” marketshare.
We’ve had a great run. We do what we do really quite well and people like us for it. We allow a lot of people of moderate means to dress and play their sport on a reasonable budget. For example, almost all of the garments that we sell, blouses is our biggest category now, we don’t have any blouses that retail for more than $200. And on the custom ladies, there are people paying well over a $1,000 for a blouse to ride around in circles in a horse show. And then there’s a lot of people thinking that they can buy a $29 cotton shirt from Myanmar. So there we sit in the middle. To me it’s a really obvious niche, but nobody else has really challenged us in it. And the stuff that we make is well made, it’s appropriate for the sport, the styling is current. You can call us and generally, let’s say you had a daughter that wanted to show a horse and she has to show this weekend and it’s Tuesday, you can call me and the girls on our customer service lines are horse people and very experienced, they’ll talk you through it and the measurements. You can have a box of stuff on your doorstep tomorrow. And if it doesn’t work send it back.