How does an English woman end up with an apparel brand launching in America?
“How does an English woman end up launching an apparel brand in America?”
I keep getting asked this, and every time I try to answer it quickly, it sounds absurd.
Because if you list it out, it doesn’t make sense…It looks unconnected and random.
A year of Zoology and then a medical imaging degree.
A brief time in veterinary research and equine imaging.
I worked in radiography for 20 years.
Now… an equestrian apparel brand in the U.S.
It sounds like I took a wrong turn somewhere, or maybe I fell and bumped my head?
But if I analyse my life with horses, it makes more sense than it first appears.
Me Aged 3 on a horse
This probably should have been a clue!
My first four years were spent in California (I had a valley girl accent to begin with) due to my Father having a posting with the Air Force. I’m pretty sure if my parents knew back then, they would never have let me near a horse!! It was a slippery slope!
When we returned to England, I must have been relentless, because they signed me up for riding lessons at age six. I use that term loosely, because I think it wasn’t so much lessons as being put on a pony and expected to stay on. We hacked a lot at that first school, and somewhere along the way, I must have just intuited how not to fall off. We moved around for my father’s job some more, and at age 8, settled in the southeast of England.
Horse riding and horses were a passion at that young age, and it was never a hobby it was just a part of me.
When I was twelve, I started riding with an instructor who, in hindsight, shaped a lot more than my riding. And, has an annoyingly astute way of making you question your whole existence.
Her teaching skills are second to none; she has a way of seeing things you’re doing subconsciously and finding ways to explain them so you can correct them.
And her drive to help riders and horses didn’t stop at BHS exams, at 40 years old, she went to University and got a sports coaching degree.
She saw a way of changing her outcomes for the better and took it, all the while bringing up 2 boys, running a barn, and teaching full-time.
She didn’t stop there; she taught University students, trained firefighters, and went to the University of Michigan to do biomechanics research, not once but twice.
Here was a woman whom I hold incredibly dear to my heart, pioneering the way for other women to better themselves in a STEM field with horses. She won’t tell you most of this as she is incredibly humble. But how lucky am I to have such an incredible mentor?
Her thirst for knowledge helped her understand how riders and horses move, interact, and function. How and why the body and mind respond the way they do under pressure.
Agaso came from that experience. A biomechanics-led equestrian clothing brand built around how riders actually move in the saddle.
During this time, I was off on my own adventures. Going in a completely unrelated direction.
Before university, I spent a year in Kentucky working on a breeding farm and helping vets. That was my first proper experience of the American horse world.
Then I came back home, did a year of a zoology degree, and thought ‘this isn’t going to get me anywhere in life’ and quickly changed course to Medical Imaging to become a radiographer. Why X-rays? Because a year in Kentucky helping x-ray horses taught me a thing or two about what appears on x-rays and how to interpret them. And if my grand plan of being a Vet failed, I could always do veterinary X-rays.
I finished my degree with a First Class Honors and looked into doing Veterinary science as a second degree, but the cost was as much as a 1-bedroom apartment, and being sensible, I thought ‘that’s an insane amount of money’ and promptly bought a horse instead… Spoiler, I should have gone back to school!
In 2006, I got my first job in Radiography after university. I worked at the Animal Health Trust in the Equine Department and then back into radiography with people in 2007. Radiology is making sense of flat images and understanding the structure behind them, constantly translating 2D into 3D in your head. The more views you have, the better the picture.
I know this sounds like it has nothing to do with breeches, until you stop to think about it properly. About how clothing interacts with a person, or how that correlates with performance on a horse.
Except it does, our choices down to the clothes we wear absolutely affect our day-to-day life, let alone when you’re on a horse trying not to impede their movement. You start to understand very quickly that structure dictates function — whether you’re looking at a joint on an X-ray or thinking about performance riding apparel.
And that brings us to 2021. My husband got a job in the USA. Life is fundamentally changed in the one small sentence: ’ I got the job.’
Then comes an existential crisis, because I can’t be a Radiographer in America because they don’t like my degree, and I don’t want to go back to University. COVID had finally killed my love for medical imaging and working in hospitals.
So, what's next?
Brenda steps in. My mentor had set up an Equestrian clothing brand, based on her biomechanics knowledge, her frustration with the lack of durability, poor technical fabrics, and bad functional design. Agaso had been born out of a need to transform how we dress ourselves as athletes in the equestrian sphere.
“Would you like to partner with me and bring Agaso to the USA?”
I understood British riders.
I had worked in Kentucky.
And I was going to be living in the USA full-time.
So in 2024, I launched Agaso USA LLC, bringing a British biomechanics-based equestrian brand into the American market. Not with a dramatic announcement. Just quietly getting on with it.
A month later, I was diagnosed with breast cancer.
There’s no elegant transition for that.
Everything got put on pause because when you’re facing the unknown, your smallest circle is the most important. Getting healthy and taking care of a family that had already been hit by cancer in the past needed me to beat it, for all of us.
What surprised me is that even in the middle of all of it, I still wanted to do this.
So in 2025, I relaunched.
Right as the tariffs were announced. I sat at our kitchen table and cried because I thought I wouldn’t be able to make it work. I should wait, or fold everything and call it a bad experiment.
It would probably be more sensible to wait.
But is there ever a perfect time to do anything?
I watched my mentor start a degree at forty and fly to the University of Michigan because she wanted better answers.
So here we are. In my 40’s determined to make life better for other riders.
Agaso isn’t about fast fashion. It’s not about churning out product for the latest tik-tok trend. It’s rooted in research, in riding, and in the slightly stubborn belief that equestrian performance clothing should function properly and last.
Make it stand out
Our first larges show — The Maryland 5* at Fairhill.
My husband and I were so excited to bring Agaso to such a big event!
If you’ve read this far, thank you.
I mean that genuinely, because small businesses don’t grow because the environment is stable. They grow because people decide they are worth supporting anyway.
And I would really love to see this grow here.
It’s been a roundabout route.
But a worthwhile one.
Agaso exists because of horses, science, good mentors, bad timing, stubbornness, and a refusal to accept that “good enough” is enough.
