A Family Affair: The Story Behind Kentucky Horsewear
How Thomas started
Thomas Tuytens can't really remember his first time near a horse; he was that young. His father, grandfather, and uncle rode out together, nothing competitive, just a family that happened to have horses running through it.
By five or six he was riding in a small, scruffy arena in Lessines, and something in him caught fire. It never really went out. Years later, back home from working abroad and unsure what came next, he did the one thing that felt like him: he went to stay with his childhood friend Raf Kooremans, mucking out stalls and riding young horses for a month, just to breathe again. Wednesday dinners of cherries and frikandellen at Raf's parents' table, a friendship that's never faded. Somewhere in that month, between the stalls and someone else's kitchen table, an idea took hold. Thomas kept looking at the gear around him and thinking: this isn't good enough. To this day, he still can't let that feeling go.
A young Thomas alongside his grandfather, Albert Tuytens. Beyond their shared love of horses, many believe Thomas inherited Albert's entrepreneurial spirit a constant drive to innovate, improve, and build something that lasts.
How Claudi started
Claudi Weber's story starts the same way, an ocean of farmland away, in Germany. She grew up with ponies always underfoot, sure long before anyone else that horses were going to be her whole life. At eighteen, she stopped waiting and went to work at a stud farm. It was there, through a bond with one particular stallion, that her path crossed with Michael Jung. Seven years as his groom followed, two Olympic gold medals among them, and later more years with Lara de Liedekerke-Meier and Taizo Sugitani, all the way to Rio.
Ask her what she actually carried home from those years, and it isn't the medals. It's something an old boss once told her: that it doesn't matter if a horse has thirty-five braids in its mane, only that the horse is happy. That's the quiet thing she brought with her when she joined Kentucky in 2016, and it's still what guides her today as Chief Product Officer, testing every product on her own horses before it ever reaches yours.
Behind every Kentucky product is Claudi's uncompromising eye for detail. If it doesn't earn a place in her own stable, it won't earn a place in yours.
Building the same thing for their own family
Thomas and Claudi met at Badminton in 2013 and built a life the same way they'd both grown up: around horses, not in spite of them. Today they're raising their daughters, Pippa and Lou, at their own stud, Pladutse, with mornings at the yard before school and weekends shaped by the horses rather than squeezed in around them. The same childhood their own parents once gave them, simply passed forward.
Claudi is usually at the stable before seven, in the saddle before she's even sat down at a desk. Kentucky comes up at their dinner table the way a school day would in any other house, because for this family it was never really separate from home life to begin with. What they're giving Pippa and Lou now is what was given to them: a childhood where the horses simply belong to the family, no different than a dog curled up by the door.
Why we see the same story in you
This is the part that means the most to us. Because when we look at the people around Kentucky, not just our ambassadors, but everyone who's ever walked into one of our stores, waved down one of our trucks at a show, or ordered a halter at midnight because the old one finally gave out, we keep hearing this exact same story, just told in a different voice.
It's in the amateur rider who saves up all year for a decent set of Riding Boots because the horse deserves better, even on a hobby budget. It's in the parent standing at the in-gate at 6 a.m. with two coffees and a folding chair, never once complaining about the early start. It's in the groom traveling with a young horse's transport halter, the kid who's just been handed the lead rope for the first time, the amateur and the Grand Prix rider reaching for the exact same product for the exact same reason, because it needs to work, and because the horse comes first.
We hear it every weekend from the people we meet at shows: someone got you up before dawn on a Saturday, a partner rearranged a holiday around a competition, a child started tagging along to the yard the way Thomas once did with his father, the way Pippa and Lou do now. Different names, different countries, different levels of the sport, somehow always the same household, rearranged around the same horse.
This sport was never going to stay in a lane of its own. It pulls in the whole household, generation after generation, and along the way it quietly builds a community out of people who'd otherwise never have met: strangers at a warm-up ring who end up swapping numbers, a truck full of familiar faces turning up at the same events year after year, a shop that starts to feel like a second stable. We built Kentucky the way we did because that's how we live. And if you're reading this, we suspect you already know exactly what we mean, because somewhere in this community, so are you.