The Segment Paying for Everything: An Adult Amateur's Unfiltered Take on the Industry She Funds

Horse & Industry sat down with Orchid Bertelsen — strategist, adult amateur, and the voice behind Back in the Saddle — to talk about the segment paying for everything, why trainer culture is losing its grip, and what equestrian brands are up against.

By Aleksandra Spasic

Published May 29, 2026

Orchid Bertelsen came back to horses thirty years after she first left them. What she found when she returned was an industry that had changed on the surface, but barely at all in substance — and a consumer segment sitting at the centre of it that nobody, it seemed, had thought to properly serve.

That observation, filtered through the polished lens of two decades working in direct-to-consumer and brand strategy, became the foundation of Back in the Saddle, her Substack publication devoted to the business of horses explained as a modern industry rather than just another a lifestyle category. It is a contrast the equestrian world has been slow to recognize, and one Bertelsen is distinctly well-placed to shine a light on.

When we sat down with her, the clarity of her analysis was immediate. "I came back with the perspective of someone who'd spent two decades in DTC (direct to consumer) and consumer brands," she told us. "I was looking at the equestrian category through that lens. It became clear quickly that the adult amateur was an enormously underserved segment."

The segment paying for everything

The adult amateur: self-funded, high-income, typically returning to the sport after a career-building hiatus — is not a niche within equestrian spending. By Bertelsen's analysis, it is the core engine driving it.

"The adult amateur is actually the segment paying for everything," she says: "the lessons, the leases, the apparel, the supplements, the entry fees, the trailer. They're educated, they research independently, they have strong opinions, and they make their own decisions."

The industry's failure to recognise this, she argues, is structural rather than accidental. The equestrian world was built around junior development and elite competition. Its operating logic — the pyramid from grassroots to grand prix — has always treated high-level sport as the aspirational centre of gravity and everything else as peripheral. The adult amateur, who is not on a development pathway and is not building toward a competitive career, simply does not fit into this model.

"The mistake the industry keeps making," Bertelsen says, "is talking down to them, instead of recognising they're some of the most discerning consumers the category has."

The trainer as intermediary — and its limits

Central to Bertelsen's critique is the role the trainer has historically played as the primary mediator between rider and product. In the traditional model, the trainer recommends the saddle fitter, the vet, the supplement, the tack store. Within this framework the brand's relationship is not with the consumer, but instead it lies with the trainer.

That model however, is fracturing.

"Today's adult amateur skips most of that," Bertelsen elaborates. "They read independent reviews, they're on Instagram and TikTok, they compare across brands. The result is a real shift in who holds the leverage."

The shift is not purely technological. It reflects a deeper change in the profile of the adult amateur themselves. Many of these riders come from other professional industries — finance, law, medicine, marketing — and bring the consumer habits of those contexts with them. Instead of waiting for a recommendation, they are conducting their own research, forming their own opinions, and making their own decisions.

For brands that built their distribution and marketing around trainer relationships, the recalibration required is significant. For those willing to invest in direct consumer relationships — transparent pricing, real product information, genuine feedback loops — the opportunity is equally as large.

What trust actually requires

Earning the loyalty of this consumer, Bertelsen argues, requires a different kind of brand behaviour. Not more marketing sophistication, but more honesty.

"Three things," she says when we ask what it actually takes. "First, deliver on the product without overpromising. The customer is paying a premium and they'll find out quickly if the product doesn't perform. Second, treat the customer like an informed adult — don't talk down, don't hide behind marketing language when there's a real product question to answer. Third, be honest about pricing, sourcing, and limitations."

The formulation is straightforward, and its simplicity is partly the point. The adult amateur is not asking for anything exceptional. They are asking for what they already receive in every other consumer category they inhabit. The gap between that expectation and what equestrian brands currently deliver is, in Bertelsen's reading, one of the most significant commercial vulnerabilities in the industry.

"Loyalty in this category," she adds, "is built slowly and lost quickly."

The data problem

Underlying many of the industry's challenges is a structural deficit in data capability. The equestrian world has not built the operational infrastructure that most consumer categories take for granted: customer data hygiene, feedback systems, the dashboards that allow a brand to understand who is buying, why, and what they think.

"The brands that will win the next decade are the ones that bring real CPG (consumer packaged goods) and DTC (direct to consumer) operating rigour into a category that hasn't required it before," Bertelsen tells us. "The systems, the talent, the dashboards, the customer data hygiene — none of it exists at the level it does in other consumer categories."

The consequence is not merely operational inefficiency. It is a category that cannot see itself clearly — that does not know its customer well enough to serve them, and that mistakes the absence of data for the absence of demand.

A culture that resists its own economics

Perhaps the sharpest observation Bertelsen makes is about the industry's relationship with the idea of itself as a business at all.

"Culture first, business second, and aggressively so," she says. "The industry actively resists business framing, in part because the culture has been built around emotional and identity-based language. The result is a lot of value left on the table and a lot of companies operating well below their potential."

It is a recognisable dynamic in other passion-led categories — the arts, food, sport — where the emotional weight of the activity creates resistance to economic analysis. But in the equestrian sphere, the stakes are unusually high. The category is a multibillion-dollar economic system. The resistance to recognising it as such is not charming authenticity. It is, in Bertelsen's reading, a sustained commercial failure. "Recognising the industry as the multibillion-dollar economic system it actually is," she says plainly, "would be the single most useful shift the next generation of leadership could make."

The next ten years

On the question of where the industry is heading, Bertelsen is skeptical of the conventional narrative. The private equity consolidation story — a wave of rollups, scale through M&A (merger and acquisition), institutional capital reshaping the category — has not delivered what its proponents promised.

"Financial engineering doesn't work well in a category that runs on deep operator knowledge and direct consumer relationships," she says. "The track record of the last few years bears that out."

What she sees instead is an open field and a more interesting competition than consolidation suggests. "The brands that win the next ten years won't be the ones that scale through M&A. They'll be the ones that finally understand their customer and build experiences that rival the other categories that customer is shopping."

That benchmark, she is clear, has shifted considerably. "The adult amateur isn't comparing your brand to the tack store across town anymore. She's comparing it to her beauty routine, her wardrobe, her wellness subscription — every other corner of her consumer life. Until equestrian brands meet that bar, they'll keep losing share to the categories that already do."

For an industry that has long defined itself by what makes it different from everything else, it is a pointed challenge. The consumer has moved on. The question is whether the industry will.

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Orchid Bertelsen writes about the business of equestrian through Back in the Saddle on Substack at orchid.substack.com. She can also be found on Instagram at @orchidinthesaddle.