Getting Smaller to Grow Bigger?

Skye and I went to dinner after Windrush, and Skye was pretty adamant that the hobby needs to think hard about going back to holding shows in homes, and start being more specialized. She'd had a lot more fun at that show than she'd had in years. I agree, somewhat, and here is sort of how our discussion went.

I'm not sure that holding all shows in homes is going to be a viable thing. Not everyone has the space. I've got a more or less finished basement that I could host a small show in, but I think I could have 10 people, max. I also do not think I could pull off a performance show in my basement (unless, maybe, it was limited to a single discipline) due to my space constraints. Even at Kate and John's, parking was an issue. Not everyone is going to have spouses or roommates that are as supportive of the hobby either.

However, given the financial crunch everyone is feeling these days, a free show space, even a small one, is a huge advantage when planning a show, especially a new one. A hall around here can run from $100 a day to nearly a thousand, depending on if you've got a friendly fire hall or a hotel to deal with. You don't really have a time limit on a home show. I've been to shows where the staff is literally breaking down tables as you are packing up your stuff, and when you are showing custom glaze china, this is a really scary proposition. Perhaps going small and having more frequent shows is the more healthy thing for the hobby right now. Certainly, "free show space" as opposed to "hundreds of dollars out of pocket before you have a single entry" is more palatable to a new showholder.

I do think that shows are going to have to specialize rather than try to serve all comers. I know back when I started showing, most people were showing OF Plastic Breyers. Stone didn't exist. Few people had chinas, and the whole hobby ceramics movement didn't exist. Neither did the hobby resin movement. There were customs, but most people had one or two (and nearly everyone had one or two). There were not enough different types of horses to support different divisions like we have now--customs and OF showed side by side in performance (and I can recall discussion about if it would be worth splitting the OF and CM for the first NAN!) and if there were chinas, they showed with the Breyers, and usually beat them. Sometimes the customs showed with the plastics too. Now shows are at least split OF and custom. OF is probably split into china and plastic, but plastic might be split by manufacturer too. Customs may be shown with artist resins, but maybe not...and then there is custom glaze china. And performance. In order to support the number of judges you need to cover all these divisions, you need to have a big show, so you need to rent a big place. It has to be a big deal--time, space, and personnel--to be viable.

Specializing shows, if its by media (all china, all plastic, all custom) or by breed/type (we've had a sport horse show, a stock horse show, a pony show, and there is a draft/pony show scheduled for later this spring) can be smaller. You can have a more varied class list (Shetland, Welsh, Other UK, Gaited ponies and so on, as opposed to the typical UK/non UK split seen here) so you have more classes that are smaller, and therefore faster to judge. You don't need a large staff to run the show. Since you're already planning a small event, you can plan on using a small space. I'm toying with an Arabian only show as a result of this discussion because I think that is the one breed everyone has a few of, and would be willing to bring out. If the class list was split out--say Stone Arab stallions, Breyer Arab stallions, Breyer Arab Mares, Stone Arab Mares, Plastic Geldings, Foals under 6 months, Foals over 6 months, Artist resin stallion, AR Mare, and so on...you could have 2 dozen halter classes that could be full, but not 30 horses deep, and use entry fees to pay for lunches and maybe trophies or something, instead of a big hall that you have a time limit on.

Another benefit of specializing shows is you could have more of them on weekends next to each other, and they need not eat each other. I realize that none of us can go to shows every single weekend, no matter where they are held, but if show holders co-ordinate, they could serve different populations of showers (say, OF plastics and china, groups that rarely cross lines) on different consecutive weekends. Two or more shows could occupy the same space at the same time, much like China Buffet and NEMHC do. A huge do it all show every month is just not a functional model any more for most show holders or showers. We've outgrown that paradigm, possibly even at our national event.

Smaller shows that don't run a whole day also give room for other stuff--the "farm tour" we got at Windrush, time for seminars (which people in Region X finally appear truly ready for without needing to have them in conjunction with a show) and the like. I'd LOVE to do a model horse retreat--no need for competition, but rather we can have judging clinics, critique performance set ups before having them go live, or possibly hash out what we actually do want as a written set of rules or judging guidelines for our hobby (rather than soley relying on rules for live horses that don't truly serve what we do well.)

So what up guys? We've been experimenting with more specialized shows for a few years now, and the changes NAMHSA made a few years ago really do open us up to all sorts of novel formats. What's your region doing, and where do you see the hobby going?