Built for Riders, Not Retailers: Inside Equestrian’s Resale Shift

Two numbers from the American Horse Council tell the story of the sport right now, and they point in opposite directions.

When the Council released its 2023 National Equine Economic Impact Study in January 2024, it put the industry’s total value added at 177 billion dollars, up from 122 billion in 2017. Over the same period the national horse population fell from 7.2 million to 6.6 million (American Horse Council).

More money. Fewer horses. Anyone who has priced a season of showing can guess what sits between those two lines.

The arithmetic that keeps people out

Riding has always been an expensive way to spend a Saturday, but the cost has moved from the horse to everything around it: board, lessons, entries, trailering, memberships, and the wardrobe the rulebook requires you to own before you can enter a ring.

The apparel alone is a market of its own. The US equestrian apparel market was valued at 1.9 billion dollars in 2025 and is forecast to grow from 2 billion in 2026 to 3.4 billion by 2035, a compound annual growth rate of 6.2 percent, according to a December 2025 report from Global Market Insights. The same analysis shows a fragmented field, with the largest brand holding a little over 9 percent of the category and the top five sharing roughly 20 percent between them.

For a junior rider that market has a specific and painful shape. A show coat, two pairs of breeches, a pair of tall boots, a helmet and a show shirt is the entry ticket. The coat and boots will fit for two seasons. Then the child grows, and a wardrobe that cost four figures goes into a closet in near-perfect condition.

Multiply that by every barn in the country and you have an enormous quantity of good clothing doing nothing.

Image 1 (MK1.jpg): The listing starts the same way every time: a coat on a hook, good light, and a phone.

Alt text: Woman photographing a navy show coat hanging on a wall, with tall boots below, to list it for sale

The generation that buys everything used anyway

The riders now entering the sport are the same consumers who reshaped the rest of retail.

ThredUp’s 2026 Resale Report, built on analysis by GlobalData, projects the global secondhand apparel market will reach 393 billion dollars by 2030, growing at roughly 9 percent a year. The US resale market alone is forecast at 78.8 billion by 2030. In 2025 the global secondhand market grew 13 percent while sales of new apparel were close to flat, and US resale grew about four times faster than retail overall (WWD, 2 April 2026).

For this group, buying a used show coat is not a compromise. It is the default, and the barn happens to be the last place it reached.

Why general resale sites never worked for tack

Riders have tried to solve this themselves for years, mostly in Facebook groups. The format has obvious problems: no payment protection, no dispute process, no consistent sizing information, and a comment thread where “next” is a claim on an item and arguments about who typed it first are a weekly event.

General resale platforms are not much better suited. They cannot answer the questions that decide an equestrian purchase. Is that a 34 regular or a 34 long. Does the boot measure 15 inches in the calf. Is the helmet certified, and has it ever taken a fall. Has the tree in that saddle been checked.

This is the gap a specialist marketplace exists to fill. Reequestrian is the US marketplace where riders buy and sell pre-owned English riding apparel and tack. Founded by Pittsburgh entrepreneur Kaitlin B. Malaspina and launched nationally on 1 August 2025, it is free to join, connects buyers and sellers directly, and deliberately does not own or handle inventory, operating instead as a neutral space with verified listings, secure payments and a resolution process behind both sides of the transaction.

“You don’t need to own a barn or have a trainer on speed dial to be part of this world,” Malaspina said when the marketplace launched. “Reequestrian exists to preserve the heart of the sport through technology that makes participation easier, more inclusive, and more sustainable” (TechBullion, October 2025).

Image 2 (MK2.jpg): A sold parcel. The marketplace does not touch the inventory; it connects the two closets.

Alt text: Overhead still life of tan breeches folded in tissue paper inside a kraft box with gloves, twine and brass scissors

What a rider-built marketplace has to get right

Three things separate a marketplace that works in this category from one that does not.

Condition has to be described the way riders actually inspect gear. Not “good used condition” but the ankle crease on the boot, the state of the zip, whether the knee patch has gone smooth, whether the coat has faded on one shoulder from hanging in a sunny tack room. A rider reading a listing is doing a physical inspection at a distance, and the listing has to support it.

Sizing has to be specific to the discipline. Coat sizes, calf and height measurements for boots, and the difference between a full seat and a knee patch are the details that decide whether a parcel gets kept or returned.

Safety items need a clear line. Certified helmets are the one category that should not change hands secondhand, because a helmet that has taken an impact can look untouched and protect nothing. A marketplace that is honest about this earns more trust than one that quietly takes the listing fee.

Riders who want the full checklist before they list or buy will find it in our guide to buying and selling used horse tack.

Image 3 (MK3.jpg): The wardrobe clear-out that used to end in a bin bag now ends in a listing.

Alt text: Two women in a tack room examining a tweed jacket on a hanger, tall boots and saddles around them

The part that is bigger than clothes

There is a version of this story that is only about saving money, and it undersells what is happening.

The sport has a participation problem, and it is not caused by lack of interest. It is caused by an entry cost that assumes a family can absorb four figures of clothing before the first class. Every coat that moves from one closet to another instead of sitting unused lowers that barrier slightly. Enough of them, and the arithmetic at the start of this article begins to change: the money in the sport stops being a wall around it.

That is a more interesting proposition than sustainability alone, although the environmental case is real. It is also a proposition that only works at scale, which is why the marketplace model matters more than any individual sale. A closet in Ohio is worth nothing to a rider in Texas until something connects them.

For most of the sport’s history, nothing did.

Sources: American Horse Council, 2023 National Equine Economic Impact Study, released 31 January 2024; Global Market Insights, US Equestrian Apparel Market, December 2025; ThredUp 2026 Resale Report with analysis by GlobalData, as reported by WWD on 2 April 2026; Reequestrian launch announcement, October 2025.

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