A Chat With May’s Profile, Suzanne Vlietstra, president of Hobby Horse Clothing Co.
CS: Considering you only mail your catalog once a year, is it a really thick book with a lot of pages?
SV: No, it’s 40 pages. We don’t have any kind of economies of scale. I guess you could title this story, “We Do Everything Wrong.”
CS: What are some of your hobbies?
SV: Well, we live on a ranch with 50 boarded horses here. And I ride. One thing that I didn’t talk about in talking about the number of employees we have, we really are a dinky company, my husband, Mike Vlietstra. He and I together do all the production, he does all the Web site. I take every photo in the catalog, I write the copy. And he’s a graphic designer by trade, and he makes the catalog. So the two of us together do it all. It doesn’t take a team of 50 specialists to pull this stuff off. I wear lots and lots of hats. Sometimes I think us little guys feel unimportant, and we’re not. That would be my message for your readers: “Keep doing what you love and keep doing all this crazy stuff because you may never be big, but you may be happy.” I’ve had a great, great fun life with this. And those goals I set when I was eight-years-old, they’re admirable goals and I’m still kind of working on them. It’s been fun. We have one six-year-old son in the midst of all this. He came with us to photo shoots when he was a little baby. He thinks it’s normal to have a bunch of computers in the living room.
