June 21, 2024

Equestrian Sports are the Greatest Demonstration of Female Empowerment

The Oxer
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•pegasusblog

Hey there, partner. This is The Oxer by Pegasus. The newsletter that takes you out of your tack room and into the global equestrian industry.

🐴 Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

💪 The equestrian industry is the epitome of female empowerment. Name a more labor intensive, dangerous, logistically-challenging sport that is managed and dominated by women… we’ll wait.
💻 Hot take: Many equestrian business websites are in need of an upgrade. But look, it’s not their fault!
🎬 Final Foals: Check them out at the end of this edition.

Before we jump into it, are you an event organizer looking to host your next clinic or horse show?

Pegasus is the first modern horse show entry system that makes it easy to run an event from start to finish. You can accept online entry registrations, receive digital signatures for your event paperwork, as well as manage the logistics, scoring, and scheduling of your event (serving both English and Western!)

Run better horse shows with the Pegasus Event Management System at www.thepegasus.app.

Pegasus Rider and Professional Show Jumper Gabriela Reutter getting ready to compete in Wellington, Florida. Photo: Katerina Sciuto

With that female dominance – consider this:

It’s labor-intensive: You have to be up before dawn and are often in bed after dusk. Oh, and there are no days off – rain, hail or snow. Horses are living, breathing animals – you can’t just park them in the garage on a bad day.
It’s full-time commitment: “I’ll just be at the barn for an hour or two” is one of our favorite lies we tell ourselves. And that’s ok, we love it there. If you know a horse person, you will know they spend every spare minute out at the barn. And often, the barn is not nearby… it can be a solid hour to get out to the countryside.
It’s unpredictable: You are riding an animal with a mind of its own, at speed, while jumping through the air. S*** happens! When Three Day Eventers competes in the Olympics, they compete at a 4 Star Level. Not 5 Stars which is the top level. Why? One of the reasons is that the insurance agencies won’t underwrite the top level because it’s too dangerous.
It’s logistically complex: Many horse shows have over 2,000 competitors. That is at least 2,000 horses. Some venues can have over 100,000 horses! For those of us who work corporate jobs – can you imagine planning and managing the logistics of this many horses? And they don’t just need to get there – they need to be moved around the horse park to a schedule.

It’s injury-prone: riders and rehabilitation… sigh. Been there, mended that. But as our trainers always tell us: when you fall off, you get back on.
It’s the true meaning of resilience: You might be doing everything right but your horse just happened to get a little too silly in the pasture with his mates and there you have it – a season-ending injury topped with a couple thousands over to the vet. So begins the stall rest.. equestrian sports may have the greatest Achilles heel!
The list could go on…

Our point is – this is a very dangerous, very time-consuming, complex environment and sport where the repercussions can be life-threatening injuries.

…And it is pretty much all run by women. Why isn’t it on the world’s pedal stool for female empowerment?

Many Equestrian Business Websites are in Need of an Upgrade

Have you seen this meme?

Yes, we too owned those shoes. And we also love our night serum.

Which brings us to our point, expressed with love: if you built your website in 1999, it is time to upgrade it.

We get that designs and trends change and that’s not on the equestrian industry to keep tabs on. I mean – look at our last story – managing complex shows and dangerous horses and mucking stalls from dusk to dawn AND a demand to have a pretty website? There aren’t enough hours in the day.

But hear us out: it’s an investment for your business.

In this day and age, you have to have a website. And ideally it would be impactful with up-to-date information.

Here’s a typical case study we heard from a few equestrian businesses:

They jumped on Google years ago and found a web design agency and paid them to build a site. The site quickly looked outdated and was prone to fall into disrepair.

The hypothesis? A small budget for the website meant they were a lower-tiered customer in the eyes of the agency.

The design agency may not have treated them as an important customer and thus built the bare minimum. Building websites were harder back then than they are now. But that’s not the worst part.

The worst part is that many equestrian businesses aren’t aware of the fact that such a site has to be maintained. And since they outsourced the build, they now have to pay the web design agency every time they want to update their site.

So they don’t update it. They just leave it be and accept it as-is. And that just may be why the internet is populated with lots of aging equestrian sites with outdated information.

The alternative is to skip the website and build your business on a platform like Facebook – which many of course do. It’s cheaper than going the agency route and faster than learning to spin up a Wix site. They can update it themselves and keep current.

BUT – that forces them to accept the risk that Facebook may ban their profile at any point, and overnight their business is shut down (like we talked about last week on The Oxer).

All of this to say – we are optimistic this may become a thing of the past with the accessibility of affordable and beautiful website creators like Farm and Fir and Limitless Marketing. Talk about swoon-worthy website designs!