Bainbridge Saddlery Store Gallops Into 21st Century

May 23, 2013

By Ann Wishart
Horse owners and riders across Northeast Ohio visit Schneider’s Saddlery in Bainbridge to buy every-thing from hoof picks to saddles worth thousands of dollars.
They admire the bridles, blankets and boots, shrug into form-fitting jackets and breeches, collect buckets, brushes and a wide variety of supplements and treat-ments for their horses as well as appreciate advice from the staff on tack and clothing.
Riders, trainers, breeders and drivers leave the store with full Schneider’s bags and smiles, unaware they have only seen a fraction of the operation.
Behind the back wall of the gener-ously sized and well-stocked showroom is another 70,000 square feet of ware-house and shipping docks set up to supply the rest of the horse world with anything imaginable.
Upstairs, many of Schneider’s 60 employees provide the ideas and talent to keep the expanding market beating a path to Schneider’s website.
Stan Schneider strides through the warehouse, past wire racks of inventory, greeting workers loading a truck with boxes.
The organization of the stock enables a salesperson to find and collect items customers in the show room have requested.
Stan and his older brother, Don, sons of Schneider’s founder, Milt, share the responsibility of steering the family business on a successful course, but the next general is hot on their heels.
“Erik helped us get into Internet sales,” Stan said of his son. “He was 17 when he came to help us launch this website in the early 2000s.”
But is was in the very non-high-tech age of the 1940s when Milt expanded his business interests from his scrapyard to selling used bridles, saddles and other tack, Schneider said.
“He always rode,” he said, adding the tack and used stable equipment business was an outgrowth of Milt’s hobby.
But as he discovered the market was ripe for expansion, his father sold the scrapyard and opened a tack shop in a rented building, Schnieder said.
“At that time, most of the business he generated was walk-in and horse shows,” Schneider said, recalling how he, as a college student, was dispatched by Milt to a horse show in the Columbus area to set up tables and pegboard on which he displayed items for sale.
Don joined Milt full time in the ’60s, expanding the business and upgrading the merchandise from cheap mass-produced goods to quality tack and equipment, adding riding clothes and more items for folks riding English style.
About that time, Stan was bumping shoulders with the Arabian horse show crowd while minding the tack tables.
“While at the shows, I was meeting a lot of highly-regarded trainers,” he recalled.
Schneider’s was selling the only tack at the showgrounds and not having to drive across town to replace a broken bridle or find a set of spurs made the riders and trainers happy.
“It was very much appreciated by the customers,” Stan said. “I learned what they needed.”
It led to the development of a private line of western show equipment called Billy Royal, he said.
By 1966 Milt moved the store again and eventually they built in Beachwood in the early 1970s, based largely on their trip to the first Quarter Horse Congress in 1967.
“It just blew us away. It was spec-tacular and well-attended,” Stan said.
He was impressed with the enth-usiastic reception of the Congress by horsemen.
“There was a thirst for knowledge fed by the clinicians at the event,” he said.
It also afforded Schneiders the chance to mingle with trainers from top stables.
“Our relationship with key pro-fessionals in all areas is instrumental to our growth,” he said, adding the areas are wide, including people enamored of quarter horses, dressage, appaloosas, hunters, jumpers and more.
Schneider’s sets up at the larger venues for both sales and connections.
“Shows are one vehicle that gets us to that market very easily,” Schneider said, adding they help sponsor numerous shows across Ohio every year.
Schneider’s first catalog was pro-duced in 1974 and was geared toward quarter horses and Arabians, which were the main western show breeds at the time, he said.
“Business expanded dramatically in the ’70s,” he said, adding Schneider’s became the tack, clothing and equip-ment source for many premier trainers of the day, including Dale Wilkinson, Stretch Bradley, Bob Loomis, Gene LeCroy and Bob Hart.
“There were 10 to 15 trainers we were working with on a very close basis,” Schneider said. “We wanted to make sure they were in the newest and best items we had.”
That effort has spanned the decades. There are riders from every discipline on the Schneider’ staff and they weigh in when asked for their opinions about trends in their parts of the industry.
“We’re very good at innovating product,” he said. “Part of our culture is to continually look for what’s the ‘next big thing.'”
The 10,000 items they stock answer most needs, but the staff works with trainers to develop a range of unique items, with six patents to Schneider credit.
“We’ve developed and improved a number of products to fill a need or figured out how to produce more economically for our customers,” Schneider said.
The general and custom markets drove them to build the 90,000 square foot building on East Washington Street in the early ’80s and since then, they have had a growing global presence.
Internet sales outstrip direct and catalog orders, Schneider said.
As the company’s Internet business overseer, he has learned about the flexibility the electronic infrastructure can provide for a business.
“You can provide tons of information on it,” he said. “Catalogs are limited, the Internet is not. Information is a tremen-dous plus to our customers.”
Over the last few years, Schneider’s has placed about 250 videos online that help explain how products are used, he said.
He and his brother have been gradually turning over the reins of the business to Eric and his brother, Steven, who split the responsibility as the business parades into the 21st century.