The Equestrian Parent Who Turned Outgrown Breeches Into a Business

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Horseback riding has a reputation as an expensive sport, and the reputation is earned. But the cost that catches most families off guard is not the horse, or the lessons, or the show fees. It is the clothes.

A child learning to ride English style, the discipline behind show jumping, dressage and the hunter ring, needs breeches, a riding helmet, paddock boots and gloves before the first lesson. Competing adds a show shirt, a show jacket, tall boots, and a matching pair of hair bows for the ring. Bought new, the everyday kit runs to several hundred dollars, and the show wardrobe can cost more than the rest put together. Then the child grows, and most of it no longer fits.

That cycle is what Kaitlin Malaspina set out to break. An equestrian parent herself, she watched young riders outgrow premium horse riding apparel faster than any family could sensibly keep buying it, and she built Reequestrian, a peer-to-peer marketplace where riders buy and sell pre-owned English riding clothing directly to one another.

Why riding gear never had a hand-me-down economy

Most youth sports have a secondhand economy that runs itself. Soccer cleats and baseball gloves get passed down the team, sold at a club swap, or dropped at a thrift store where the next family finds them.

Horse riding gear never developed a reliable one, and English riding clothes in particular never did, for a reason that only becomes obvious once you try to buy any of it.

Riding breeches are sized on their own scale, and the scale changes depending on whether the maker is American, British, Italian or French. A rider who takes one number in an American brand may take a completely different number in an Italian one, and the label alone will not tell a parent which is which. A show jacket is tailored to sit correctly over a saddle and is judged on its fit in the ring. Tall boots are measured by calf width and calf height as well as foot size, and a pair that is an inch out cannot be worn. Even the helmet has to be fitted to the head it protects.

None of that survives a thrift store rail or a general resale app, where horse riding clothing is filed under sportswear and left there. A listing that reads riding pants, size medium tells a riding family nothing they can act on. The gear is too specialized for a general marketplace and too expensive to throw away, so it accumulates in tack trunks and closets across the country, worn for a season and then kept for years.

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A marketplace built for one sport

Reequestrians answer was to build a marketplace dedicated to riding apparel, designed around the way that apparel is actually sized, described and bought.

Verified sellers list their own items, which means the person selling a pair of breeches can say which brand they are, what the label size is, whether they are knee patch or full seat, and what they were ridden in. Buyers browse the categories riders already think in: breeches and jodhpurs, show jackets, riding shirts, tights, tall boots, accessories and show bows, which is to say a complete English riding outfit. The company is US-based and woman-owned, and it describes its purpose as making the sport more accessible by keeping good gear in circulation.

The idea is simple. A pair of breeches worn for one season by a child who then grew three inches is not worn out. A show jacket used at four competitions before its rider moved up a division is barely broken in. Reequestrian gives those items a second rider instead of a shelf.

The selling side is deliberately simple, because the people doing the selling are parents with a tack trunk to clear rather than retailers. A seller photographs the item, records the brand, the label size and the condition, sets a price, and the listing goes live to riders looking for exactly that. When it sells, the platform handles payment and the seller ships it. For a family that has just been through a growth spurt, that is an afternoons work to recover a meaningful share of what the wardrobe cost.

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Arriving as the old retail model disappears

The pre-owned market for riding gear is finding its footing at the same moment the traditional retail market for it is shrinking.

In 2026, Dover Saddlery, for five decades the largest equestrian retailer in the United States, began closing its roughly thirty stores. Riders who had walked into a Dover to be fitted for tall boots, to find breeches in the right cut, or to try on English riding attire before a show, found themselves shopping online, often without the guidance that had made expensive purchases feel safe.

At the same time, the wider resale economy has changed what buyers expect. A generation that buys clothing on peer-to-peer apps as a matter of routine sees nothing unusual about buying a show shirt the same way, as long as the listing tells them what they need to know.

Reequestrian sits at that intersection: a specialist marketplace arriving as the specialist retailer leaves, for a customer who was already comfortable buying secondhand.

What it means for a family getting started

For a parent whose child has just begun lessons, the practical difference is large.

Buying the first years horse riding outfits new is the point at which many families quietly decide the sport is not for them. Buying the same kit pre-owned from other riding families, on a platform where every listing was written by someone who knows what size 26 long breeches are, changes that calculation. The gear costs a fraction of retail, it is described by people who understand it, and when the child outgrows it, the same platform is where it goes to the next rider.

That last part is the piece that matters most. A marketplace where every buyer is also a future seller does not make riding cheaper once. It makes it cheaper every season, for as long as the child keeps growing.

A sustainability story the sport rarely tells

English riding apparel is built on natural materials and traditional craft: leather boots, wool jackets, cotton show shirts. Yet riding is also a sport in which a great deal of that material is bought, worn briefly, and stored indefinitely.

Reequestrian calls itself a circular fashion platform, and in this context the phrase means something concrete. A riding wardrobe outlives its owners use of it many times over. Keeping that wardrobe moving between riders, rather than sitting in closets, is the most direct sustainability gain available to the sport, and it happens to be the same thing that makes riding affordable.

Reequestrian also builds something the sport has always had informally and never had a home for. Riding families have passed gear between barns and between siblings for as long as children have outgrown boots. What Reequestrian adds is a place where that exchange can happen between families who have never met, with enough information in every listing that a strangers outgrown show jacket is as safe a purchase as one from the barn next door.

Reequestrian is a US peer-to-peer marketplace for pre-owned English riding apparel, founded by equestrian parent Kaitlin Malaspina. New to the sport? Start with their guide to what breeches are and how to choose them.

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