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

Catalog Success: Where’s the company headquartered?
Suzanne Vlietstra: Chino, California. That’s about 30 miles east of Los Angeles.
CS: What are your catalog’s customer demographics?
SV: Our customer is female; 30 to 50 [years of age]; college-educated; hundred thousand dollar household income, or greater; owns two horses; and horses are her passion.
CS: When was the company established? When did you begin mailing catalogs?
SV: I started the company when I was in junior high school. It was incorporated in 1987 while I was in high school. I didn’t mail a catalog until 1991. I always wanted to. When I was eight-years-old I set some little goals for myself: I wanted to have a horse-related business, a supply-type business, and I wanted to have our own building. And I wanted to have a catalog, because when I was a little kid there were some horse catalogs. And to me, they were like the Sears Wish Book. So that was inspiring. And I wanted a million dollars in sales. And basically all that happened in about 1994.
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.

Joe Keenan is the executive editor of Total Retail. Joe has more than 10 years experience covering the retail industry, and enjoys profiling innovative companies and people in the space.