The 2021 Women of the Year Awards: Innovator – Winner

Entrepreneurial Leader: Winner 
Carole Herder
President, Cavallo Horse & Rider

Carole Herder left Vancouver in 1993 to get away from it all. Her children’s clothing business, whose clients included Holt Renfrew, Nordstrom and Saks Fifth Avenue, had suffered in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement. So Herder and her young family moved to the Sunshine Coast town of Roberts Creek, where she took up horse riding.

If that sounds idyllic, it wasn’t always so fun for the horses. Herder, who had no preconceived ideas about things equestrian, noticed that it was considered acceptable for them to suffer from hoof-related ailments. Having acquired her own horses and founded a business that made saddle pads to help combat those problems, she zeroed in on the hoof itself. Why did the animals have to wear metal shoes instead of going barefoot? “It was like an epiphany one day when I said, I cannot allow this metal to be nailed into live tissue on my horses’ feet anymore.”

So Edmonton-raised Herder set out to find an alternative. “Had I known then what I know now, I don’t think I’d have had the courage to do it,” she says. “Because there was so much opposition, and it was really hard, and it took years to change people’s minds.”

In 2004, Herder and Cavallo Horse & Rider CEO Greg Giles, who has a manufacturing background in industrial work safety footwear, began developing a hoof boot that provided comfort, safety and traction—and was easy to put on and take off. For the shock-absorbing sole, they settled on thermoplastic polyurethane. Herder got some assistance from Silvana Rivadeneira, a former designer for B.C. shoemaker John Fluevog. “She helped me look at ways to design it so that it was appealing and yet still functional.”

Then came the hard part: selling the boots. “It was pure perseverance,” Edmonton-raised Herder says of launching Cavallo’s first product in 2006. “Sometimes I would go to these horse shows, and I’d have one or two people in this tent.”

But the boots—aimed at recreational trail riders, most of whom are women—gained traction by word of mouth, says Herder, who promoted her speaking events in equestrian magazines. Several years ago, she got some valuable publicity by convincing mounted police officers to try the product.

Cavallo now sells its hoof boots, which are made in Asia, in more than 25 countries Although it remains the No. 1 brand, several competitors have entered the field. Herder takes that as a compliment. “We feel we’re still the best boot on the market, and we absolutely are in terms of marketing and distribution,” she says. “I challenge anyone to come up against us.”