6-02-2026 4:21am

After 50 Years

The Bill Always Comes Due: How Dover Saddlery’s Collapse Left the Industry Holding the Bag

Our store will soon be closing its doors. Thank you for your support and loyalty over the years. Serving you and your horse has truly been our privilege, and we’re grateful for the trust you’ve placed in us. We’ve cherished every moment spent helping you pursue your passion and supporting the equestrian community. Thank you for riding with Dover and allowing us to be a part of your journey.

BY PIPER KLEMM, theplaidhorse.com

You can’t go online without seeing Dover Saddlery branches closing, final sales, and people urging others to use up their gift card.

Steep discounts. Inventory moving fast. Emails hitting inboxes with the kind of urgency of a liquidation. And for the average rider scrolling through the deals on a weekend night, it looked like an opportunity and a chance to grab that saddle pad or those boots or that blanket at a price that felt almost too good to be true.

It was too good to be true. Just not for the reason most shoppers understood.

The collapse of Dover Saddlery is not, at its core, a retail story. It is a story about who pays when private equity decides it is done, and the answer, as it almost always is in these situations, is everyone except the people who made the decision to walk away. The brands, the manufacturers, the small family-owned businesses who trusted a century-old equestrian institution with their products and their livelihoods are the ones left standing in the wreckage, invoice in hand, waiting for a check that is not coming.

The numbers, as The Plaid Horse has learned through conversations with multiple affected companies, are staggering in their range and devastating in their specificity. Smaller vendors FINISH READING HERE