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

CS: So the idea for the company was formed in middle school?
SV: I started it when I was in junior high school … I guess I was about 14. I was a horse girl. If you’ve ever known any of them, this isn’t a passing fancy for most of us. It becomes a passion and a lifestyle. My mom was a sewing teacher and a single parent, and I always wanted to buy all this stuff that I saw in the catalog, and she’d say, “Well, let’s make it.” So I learned to sew from her and started making products for the horse, like blankets. Instead of sewing for a Barbie, I’d sew for my pony and my horse. So instead of being real small it was real big. And my mom was a real do-it-yourselfer, so she helped me buy a big sewing machine and source the materials — which used to be a lot harder before the Internet, to find the canvases and nylons and things that you used to make the equipment. It kind of kept going from there. I made stuff at home, sewed in my attic. Had a little shop.
Then went to college and got a degree in English and another degree in history, and should have taken a lot more small-business classes. Then after I got out of college I started renting a shop. Moved out of the attic and rented a shop. And I’ve been plugging away ever since. The biggest change is we went from making stuff for horses to making stuff for riders, primarily.