Equestrian Isn't Catching Up to Retail
It's catching up to itself, and that should worry the brands standing still
At a competition yard in Europe this week, the horse is almost certainly wearing better technology than the brand that sold its rider a jacket is using to remember her. A sensor tracks its stride, its recovery, its heart rate. The maison that made her clothing has no record of her once she leaves the shop.
That gap is the real story. The easy excuse is that equestrian is a niche, traditional industry, so naturally it lags the digital economy: nobody expects a saddlery to move like a tech company. It's a comfortable excuse. It's also wrong on both counts. Retail isn't the slow industry equestrian gets to hide behind, and equestrian isn't actually short on digital sophistication. It's short on pointing what it already has at the right problem.
The excuse doesn't survive contact with the data
McKinsey's Industry Digitization Index puts technology, media, finance and professional services at the top. No surprise there. But retail was never the laggard this excuse assumes: McKinsey notes retail and financial firms were “among the first movers” investing in digital assets as far back as the 1960s, and names Burberry as having “set the bar among retailers” for blending digital experience into physical retail.¹ Burberry is not a tech company. It's a fashion house with the same wholesale, DTC and boutique complexity as any premium maison, which is proof the ceiling for a fashion-adjacent retailer is set at the very top of the entire economy, not at some discounted “retail is different” tier.
So the real comparison isn't equestrian versus Google. It's equestrian versus its own lifestyle-retail peers, and there the gap is stark. 79% of retail businesses now invest in personalisation tools, and McKinsey ties effective personalisation to roughly 40% more revenue for the companies that execute it well.² My own scan of 30 recognisable European equestrian brands this month found exactly one, LeMieux, operating at that level: a real loyalty and personalisation stack, PE-backed, built over several years.³ The other 29 sit at the two tiers below it. That's not equestrian being a slow industry. That's equestrian being nearly alone in an industry that solved this years ago.
The part that should actually concern the industry
Here's what makes equestrian different from a genuinely under-digitised sector like agriculture or basic manufacturing: it isn't short on technical sophistication. I've written before about how advanced the performance and welfare side of this industry already is: biometric wearables, GPS tracking, genomic breeding data, the FEI's own digital passport infrastructure.⁴ Someone in this industry already knows how to build rigorous, sensor-fed, data-native systems. They just built them for the horse.
That's the uncomfortable part. This isn't an industry that needs to import a capability it has never had. It needs to redirect a capability it already has, proven, at scale, in the same barns and the same brands' customer base. The rider who trusts a sensor to tell her how her horse's stride changed this week is not going to find a brand that remembers her boot size and blanket weight technologically intimidating. The barrier was never the customer, and it was never the industry's appetite for data. It was that nobody pointed the second half of that appetite at the business.
What catching up actually requires
Not a moonshot. LeMieux didn't out-innovate the category with something unavailable to its peers. It did the unglamorous work: a real product-data foundation, a loyalty platform, a few years of consistency. Every brand in my 30-brand scan sitting at Tier 1 or Tier 2 could do the same thing, on a similar budget, starting this year. The technology isn't the obstacle. The decision to treat the commercial side of the business with the same rigour as the performance side is.
If you're wondering where your own house sits against these tiers, or what the first move would look like, I'm always glad to compare notes.
Elisabeth
The Beauty of Data. Designed for Growth.
References
1. McKinsey Global Institute, “Which industries are the most digital?” (Industry Digitization Index rankings; retail as an early digital mover; Burberry example). https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/overview/in-the-news/which-industries-are-the-most-digital
2. DemandSage, “79 Personalization Statistics 2026” (retail personalisation-tool investment; McKinsey revenue-impact figure cited therein). https://www.demandsage.com/personalization-statistics/
3. Maison Virgilio, proprietary data maturity assessment of 30 European equestrian brands, August 2026 (unpublished research).
4. See “The Equestrian Industry Isn't Behind on Digital. Retail Is.” (Maison Virgilio, August 2026) for the wearables, GPS, genomics and FEI digital-passport detail.
