Looking at them idling in a pasture or carrying a policeman at least another shoulder higher than any crowd in the city, one naturally suspects horses must feel pretty good about themselves.  Even draft horses have a nobility, a power, a dynamism in repose that few other common animals can boast.

Which may explain my horror at discovering this website for The Horse Tailor.  Based in Costa Rica, the Horse Tailor provides, among more typical tack and dressage, costumes for horses, miniature horses and ponies.  Seriously.  You want your magnificent quarter horse to look like Scooby Doo?  The Horse Tailor can help.  They design and sew all sorts of costumes for your equine friends: angels and devils, witches and princesses, leprechauns, lions, bumblebees and dozens more.  Plus, they’ll custom fabricate whatever silky embarrassment you can imagine for your equine friend.

Now I don’t think it’s a dumb business idea–quite the contrary.  I bet the Horse Tailor will be a success for many, many years.  This company is well poised to fill a need–micro though it may be–through the efficiency and flexibility only a web based business can enjoy.  If they were merely a brick and mortar store, particularly one located on a Central American island, they would be out of business inside a month.  But because they can reach out to communities on the web and create direct, one-to-one contact through email, they have an ability to aggregate a large audience scattered across an impossibly large geography.  And so marketing their hyper-niche wares is actually simpler than trying to sell general products to the general market: they have a tightly-defined, deeply engaged audience with very specific needs (“Yes, I’d like a Harry Potter outfit for my Arabian…”).

The Horse Tailor will never enjoy the recognition of say, a Burberry.  Then again, we’ll never read about their models becoming strung out anorexics.

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By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79

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