Happy New Year from all at TCS, I hope you had a great Christmas and had some quality pony time.
Total Contact Saddles have had a great 2024 and the TC community has contributed to this. Sharing your stories and photos is amazing and inspiring; it helps give riders new to the TCS concept the confidence to try the saddle for themselves. https://www.facebook.com/groups/www.totalcontact.co.uk/
We have continued to grow with more and more people realising the TCS saddle is the best option for their horses.
TCS is becoming more mainstream, I think one of the moments that highlighted this was in the Your Horse Magazine Survey #hack1000miles, where 6.5% of voters preferred TCS as the favorite saddle to hack in. They even gave us our own category showing we are becoming accepted as "normal", the survey included every other saddle type including GP's, treeless saddle, dressage saddles etc
In other news - We continue to talk to British Dressage, it's not a firm no, but we just can't seem to get the go ahead to use the TCS even with our specifically designed saddle seat with a pommel and cantle, they are now saying the flaps on the saddle are not big enough!!! I am sorry to everyone who wants to compete and is unhappy about putting a "compliant" saddle on their horses just for the competition. Horse comfort and welfare comes first and you have chosen to ride in the TCS for that reason. We will regroup this year and consider our next steps in the dialogue with BD, we haven't given up yet! Perhaps we can do our own "online" dressage test for TCS'ies this year.
What's new - In 2024 we introduced the new Premium leather saddle seat, our designer wanted to make something to put under the TCS to help horses with a high wither or prominent bones and to give protection where the rider is slim with sharp seat bones. While doing pressure tests we had the usual fabulous results from the TCS showing no pressure of significance but when we used a slim rider with sharp seat bones this showed up as pressure from the seat bones so we always advise extra padding in these cases and our saddle seats are the perfect solution.
Some people ask what the difference is between the Saddle seat PAD and the Premium saddle seat - The Premium saddle seat is a 3D design so wraps around the horse back, whereas the saddle seat PAD is flat on the bottom, the same as a saddle pad. Both are made from layers of moulded foam, firmer on the top for the rider and softer on the bottom for the horse. We use leather for the 3D saddle seat as the leather moulds around the shape a lot better, the saddle seat pad we can make using synthetic materials as it is a simpler design and has a flat bottom the same as a saddle pad. https://total-contact.co.uk/collections/saddle-pads
Thank you for your patience - Not everyone has to wait for their saddles, sometimes we may have a saddle made and available to send immediately but often we have a small backlog.
To explain, we have to order the leather many months in advance and schedule batches of saddles to be made many weeks in advance, this means there is an element of guess work as to what we will need in the future. Sometimes the guesswork is wrong resulting in delays to production, winter is when we try to catch up and build stockof all TCS products.
Thank you for your patience and understanding last year, you are such a fabulous community and I can say hand on heart not one of you have complained, you are all so sympathetic to the fact that we are a small business with limited resources. What you get in return are saddles and saddle seats handmade in the UK by dedicated saddlers focussed on producing high quality value for money product.
2025 - We are confident in the design of the TCS & saddle seat your feedback has helped us get it right. This year we will be concentrating on producing more social media content and informative videos. We will also be working with our ambassadors across the world to make purchasing a TCS as easy and as possible and provide the back up to share the word with riders new to the TCS concept, LESS SADDLE MORE CONTACT
We listen to you - We are always looking for ways to improve the TCS experience, if you have any suggestions or requests we would love to hear from you. It's always interesting to hear your thoughts and ideas and we love seeing your real world action photos and videos.
That's enough from TC Towers for now, but please do keep sharing your photos, we love seeing what you and your TCS's have been upto.