Bucking The Trend
Local Saddlery's softer design gains worldwide following By Eric Apalategui for The Columbian, Sunday November 4, 2007
In a storage room at Ansur Saddlery LLC in Washougal, Carole Weidner picks up a contraption that looks as comfy as the chair on a torture device. In reality, she ripped this plywood and metal skeleton from inside a $4,700 saddle by a well-known competitor she's too polite to name.
"I was horrified when I saw what was inside," said Weidner, the Ansur company president who hopes to get more of those painful-looking saddles off the backs of horses with upgrades this year to the Clark County company's unique line of softer saddles. Weidner hopes the changes, particularly the recent introduction of Ansur's first Western saddle, will more than double sales, she added.
Ansur makes the only saddle sold in most parts of the world that doesn't use large pieces of metal, wood, fiberglass or other hard materials to form the pommel and cantle,or a "tree"" connecting those two raised portions," Weidner said. Instead of using rigid components, Ansur achieves the traditional saddle shape with layers of synthetic materials called elastomers formed beneath finely crafted leather exteriors. The elastomers were developed by NASA for spacesuits and are in wider use for such purposes as football pads. The layers bend with the horse and absorb the trauma of riding while dispersing heat, easing the ride for human and horse," Weidner said.
Weidner, now 67, never intended to go into the saddle business. All she wanted was to continue dressage competitions after her beloved Morgan, the late Mountain View Bronze, resisted certain movements. Weidner tried 17 saddles before realizing it was the unforgiving innards of each saddle that rubbed "Bronzie" the wrong way.
"Carole kept listening and asking why is he doing this?" said her husband, Don Weidner, Ansur's Vice president.
"I was trying to put that rigid frame on a nonrigid body," she said of the dismantled traditional saddle. She picked up an Ansur saddle. "You put this on a horse and it moves with him. It's like a second skin."
In the early 1990s, Weidner was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a double mastectomy. Training her horse took her mind off the suffering of surgery and chemotherapy.
With no saddle on the market Weidner's horse would tolerate, Don and her late father, Carl Floten, encouraged her to make one. She teamed with trainer Peter DeCosemo and a local saddle maker, eventually creating a flexible saddle that satisfied both Bronzie and competitive requirements.
The morning after returning home from her first competition with that new saddle, a Pennsylvania horse trainer called wanting one of their custom saddles. The news, she said,was "all over the Internet."
"I did not know what the Internet was," Weidner said. " I didn't have a clue what she was talking about."
Partnership
The Weidners formed a partnership with DeCosemo, adopting their name after an early customer exclaimed, "Oh, this is the answer!" The partners tinkered with the spelling to give it character, although customers sometimes assume that the brand born on the Weidners small Washougal ranch and crafter in Clark County is European.
In 2000, Ansur's first full year, they shipped about $1 million in saddles. Sale have grown, although Weidner did not disclose specific sales data for competitive reasons.
About 18 months ago, the Weidners split with DeCosemo, who returned to his native Great Britain. As part of their agreement, DeCosemo has exclusive rights to sell saddles using their early patents in member nations of the European Union. He calls his saddle the "Solution," while the Weidners kept the Ansur name and market their saddles everywhere else.
The Weidners contracted with L.P. Streifel, a master saddler who revamped the Ansur line with better craftsmanship, improved trauma systems and numerous custom options, Weidner said. New Ansur saddles come standard with an anti-theft microchip and front D rings and are priced between $2,195 and $2,995 before customizing.
"We have really, really ramped up the product – certainly in its beauty, as well as its performance," she said.
Hunter-Jumper
Ansur's new models are hunter-jumper styles called the Elite I and II and its latest saddle, the Westernaire. The latter introduces Ansur to the Western saddle market, which in the United States is roughly twice as large as the English market, two industry experts estimated.
Paul Wahl, editor of "Tack 'n' Togs Merchandising," has featured Ansur in a story about "treeless" saddles, which he said have gained acceptance among riders. "If you have a hard-to-fit horse,they're wonderful," he said.
Nevertheless, Wahl said that a challenge facing all saddle-makers is the aging of their customers. Most American riders are middle-aged or older women, with fewer younger riders. "Saddle-makers need to make their money now, because it's going to be tough," he said
Last year Ansur moved production from Vancouver to a building behind the Walgreens store in Lacamas Center, in eastern Camas. There they employ eight to 10 saddle-makers but hope to hire a few more with the new models.
While Ansur on one hand must convince traditional riders to give up their rigid saddles, on the other the Weidners aggressively defend the patents that make their saddles unique. In 2004 the company sued an overseas saddle-maker for patent infringement for allegedly copying Ansur's designs. Before trial the other company agreed to redesign its saddles.
"Protecting Patents guards the bottom line while also sparing horses from knock-off models that don't perform as well," Weidner said.
Networking Strategies
Ansur reaches customers through distributors, trade shows and word of mouth. They've considering spending more on advertising or paid endorsements, but doing so would force them to charge higher prices, something the Weidners have resisted. Currently, they said, their saddles are priced in the mid-high range among better saddles.
"Most of us own a typical, regular horse," Carole Weidner said. "I'd like to keep it so those folks can have Ansur saddles."
