Newmarket, since the 1930s
My family have raced and owned horses in Newmarket since the 1930s. That is where this comes from.
What that means for your yard
Owning horses puts you on a particular side of the gate. You arrive on a Saturday morning, you walk round, and within about ten seconds you have formed a view of the operation — usually before anyone has said a word about the horse.
Most of what forms that view is not the horse. It is whether the yard looks like it is run by people who care about detail. Whether the staff look like a team or like eleven people who happened to turn up. Whether the thing with the yard's name on it looks like it was made for them or ordered from a catalogue.
I am not going to pretend I have done a lifetime of five o'clock starts. But I have spent a lot of years being the person a yard was presenting to, and I know precisely what that person notices. That is the whole of what this business is for.
Rowley & Bowes
The Rowley Mile takes its name from Old Rowley, Charles II's stallion, and then from the King himself. It is the oldest straight in racing and it runs along the edge of the town we live in.
Bowes is the family name. Putting the two together is the whole of what this is: an embroidery house in Newmarket, run by people from the sport, for the people who make their living from horses here.
What we believe about the work
That the mark is the job. Most of this trade treats drawing your colours for thread as a twenty-pound administrative step, then wonders why the stitching looks approximately right rather than right. We spend hours on it, charge properly for it, and send you the physical sample before you commit to anything.
That a narrow range beats a wide one. We would rather make eight things well than list four hundred.
That you should be told the truth about what you are buying. Our embroidery is machine work. The craft is in the drawing, the thread matching and the proofing. We will not call it hand stitched, because it isn't.