Background
Ryde had raised money before it had a brand. That is a stranger place to start than it sounds: the funding says somebody believes in the product, and nothing yet says what the company is.
There was a name and a mark. Nicke had run the naming route — Grani first, with Grani Prix and Grani Forza as sub-routes, then Rajd, then Ryde, a Swedish pun that lands in English without translating — and built the mark from three overlapping circles resolving into a shield. Good work, and finished.
But a name and a mark are not a brand. Nobody could yet say what Ryde sounded like, who it was for, or why anyone should believe a four-person company had made a better stirrup than the ones that had existed for a century.
Creative team
| Andreas Carlsson | Design, development, photography, film |
| Sanna-Marie | Inventor |
| Karin Falkemo | CEO |
| Patrik Lindberg | Constructor, industrial design |
| Jennifer Norén | Communication and marketing |
| Nicke Bergström | Naming, logotype |
| Henrik Berglöf | Copy |
The problem
Equestrian used to be fashion
Equestrian brands are arranged.
Look at the category and it is all the same photograph: makeup on the rider, the horse groomed to a shine, white breeches against a clean arena, everything styled to within an inch of its life. Closer to a fashion editorial than to a sport.
None of it looks like riding. Riding is a five-in-the-morning alarm, mud to the knee, a horse that does not want to load, and the friendship that makes people do it anyway. That whole side of the sport — the part everyone in it actually recognises — was missing from every brand competing with Ryde.
The reference we kept coming back to was Chrysler's Imported from Detroit. Grainy, rough, unglamorous, and unmistakably about graft. If that register could be brought into a category this polished, Ryde would not look like a smaller version of its competitors. It would look like a different argument.
Where it started
7 days on Gotland
So the project did not start with a brief. It started with a week.
Everyone involved went to Gotland in late October and stayed there — founders, riders, camera. Not a shoot with a brand strategy attached; the week was the brand work, and the photography and film were how we found out what we thought. Shooting the thing is a faster way to learn whether it is true than writing it down and hoping.
Tone of voice — the Gotland grid that went into the brand guidelines
What followed
18 months of whittling the final brand
Gotland started the brand. It did not finish it.
What followed was a year and a half of tuning: more shoots, interviews with riders, and — the part that mattered most — a founding team getting steadily clearer about what they had actually built.
That last one is easy to underrate. Founders deep in a product often cannot say plainly why it is good, because every part of it seems equally important to them. Watching them explain it to other people, over and over, is how the hierarchy appears.
Where it landed
Two sides, two jobs
The feeling is action sport. Dirt, early mornings, weather, and above all movement — a horse at speed through water, a rider who has been up since five. Movement turned out to be the whole thing: a still photograph of a stirrup is a product shot, and a horse moving is a reason to care. This side carries the Nordic register — Gotland, graft, sweat, hard work.
The engineering is the opposite temperature. The stirrup was developed with metallurgists and with anatomy specialists working on both the rider's and the horse's anatomy, which is not a claim you can make loudly without evidence, and is devastating when you can. This side carries the proof.
The division of labour is the platform. Emotion sells the world; engineering carries the claim. Neither survives alone — feeling without proof is a lifestyle brand selling safety equipment, and proof without feeling is a spec sheet.
The three sites
Where the platform became visible
The platform showed up in three builds, each made for how far the company had actually got.
The teaser, November 2022. Nothing to sell — the stirrup was not in production and had no price, so a shop would have been a promise Ryde could not keep. One page, the Gotland material, an email capture, live for Stockholm International Horse Show.
The pre-order shop, 2023. Six weeks, eleven steps: content and product skeletons, then markets, shipping zones, payments and a Fortnox integration. Shopify, because a four-person company should not be maintaining its own checkout. I built the theme — Prestige as the base, then Liquid, so it behaved like Ryde rather than like a theme demo. Three design rounds, and across them you can watch the platform arrive: the first round is loud and still guessing, the shipped version is quiet and certain.
The full site, autumn 2023. Pale sage and dusty blue, Neue Montreal, editorial cards over full-bleed action photography, and the four things the stirrup does as a plain numbered list. The two sides finally in the same room: the photography carries the feeling, the numbered list and the function films carry the engineering.
The teaser
The pre-order
The full site
