by Crystal Brumme Pickett, Founder of The Equiery
December 2025 marks the 35th anniversary of the first issue of The Equiery. Wow! 35 years. While Mercedes Clemens and I may have founded the publication, it was Hardy Pickett who was the linchpin to its ultimate success—and this is the perfect issue in which to share the story.
The Origin of The Equiery
Today, I am Hardy Pickett’s daughter-in-law, and I have been for the last 9 years. But in 1990, I was still Crystal Brumme, and I had never heard of a Pickett. I had quit working for my family’s chain of retail photo processing labs, and I had abandoned my Master’s program at the University of Maryland. I was ready to do something on my own, but what?
Mercedes Clemens and I had been school-mates. Mercedes was brilliant and inquisitive about all things tech, and she was ready to quit her IT-related job at the time. We decided to start a business together, but we had no idea what kind of business. We took a weekend retreat to brain-storm.
The “idea” for The Equiery did not come out of our brainstorming session; it came out of our kvetching. I was no longer on campus, so I was no longer eligible to ride with the UMCP equestrian team. Therefore, I was looking for a new stable. Mercedes was simultaneously looking for a new boarding barn for her horse. We swapped gripes about how difficult it was to find stables, how stone-age it was to look through the Yellow Pages, how annoying it was to study the bulletin boards in the back of the tack and feed stores, and in general we bemoaned that “in this day and age” there “ought to be a central source of equestrian information”—eureka! We suddenly realized what our new business was. We pulled out a dictionary (no internet then) and quickly cobbled together the Latin root for horse and the Latin suffix for “a place to buy and sell” or “a collection of” and voila! The Equiery was born—as well as a unique trademark!
Before there was an internet
We got busy. Mercedes purchased the new state-of-the art Mac XO, Apple’s first personal desktop computer to sell for less than $1,000, and dove into learning this “new” thing called “desktop publishing.” I started driving to every horse farm I could find: if I could see horses or even horse fencing, I drove in. (I consider it an achievement that I never got shot.) I’d pitch our very simple concept to every barn, tack and feed store owner:
- The Equiery would be a free monthly publication.
- The Equiery would publish, for free, a directory of lesson, training and boarding stables, so the consumer would easily have all their choices at their fingertips.
Left to right: Crystal Brumme Pickett, Equiery co-founder and (at the time of this photo) Pickett daughter-in-law; Hardy Pickett; June Pickett. Before there was “A. Hardy Pickett” in the life of The Equiery and Crystal, there was the June Pickett. This photo was taken at the 2016 Washington International Horse Show by the late, great Rex Reed during the “Buck Breast Cancer” fundraiser in memory of Laura Pickett.
The Equiery would be available at every tack and feed store and would help antiquate the bulletin board by being a portable bulletin board. No longer would store clerks be put in the un-comfortable position of “recommending” one barn over another; they could just give the in-quiring customer an Equiery! Today, a business that changes the way a community does business is known as a “disrupter.” Well, The Equiery disrupted!
The goal of every stable visit was to spread the word AND to build our database: “Do you give lessons, train or board horses? Could I please include you, for free, in The Equiery’s Riding & Boarding Stable Directory? I promise you will never get a bill.” Not only did I not get shot, most of the barn owners said yes! Many became adver-tisers, and some become good friends.
While Mercedes was rapidly giving herself a Master’s in database development and desktop publishing, design and layout, I was stockpiling publications, paid and free. We borrowed the best ideas from the best: USA Today (the bite-sized blurbs in News & Views), Pennysaver (we featured classifieds like content; we didn’t hide them in the back), People Magazine (Out & About photos), the Yellow Pages (our Riding & Boarding Stable Directory), church bulletins (Calendar of Events), Washington Post and HoC-oMo Freddies (local ads and news), the Chronicle of the Horse (art on the cover), Horse of the Delaware Valley—and every local gazette we could find, adapting the most frequently read section (the obituaries) into Greener Pastures.
We had a stable of “Posties” (Washington Post contributors) providing us with illustrations and articles. We even had a purloined Washington Post Style Guide, which we used faithfully—with the notable exception that we capitalized breeds of horses.
Those over the age of 40 remember when we could dial 411 and the operator would find any phone number for us. We created a 411 for the Maryland horse industry, our “hotline:” 1-800-244-9580 for free directory information. No matter where you lived in Maryland, we could pull from our database the service professionals you needed in your area: vet, farrier, hay—you name it. And if it was not in our database, we would find it and call you back. (Remember: the inter-net had not yet been invented!)
Although it was the ‘90s, most of our retail clients still wrote up customer tickets by hand or used a simple cash register. We pushed themto “upgrade” their technology, to get a fax machine so that we could get their ad proof to them immediately, rather than mailing or driving it to them.
We were growing by leaps and bounds! But we had a problem: cash flow.
Even though the internet had not yet been invented, the world still moved fast. No horse dealer or realtor was going to place a classified ad for a horse or a farm—an ad that wasn’t going to appear until the following month—until thevery last moment, in case it sold.
We would take those ads over the phone (no email), and then we either had to rely on our clients to remember to pay us, or we had to in-voice them (which increased our costs of doing business). Classifieds started at only $5, and it is quite easy to overlook owing someone $5.
The solution was to accept credit card payments. The Washington Post accepted credit cards for classifieds, and we needed to be able to do that as well. Pulling from my retail background, I approached the standard credit card processing services…and was laughed out the door. Again, for those of you under 40, this was before the days of Square, Stripe, PayPal, etc. Be-fore the internet! Back then, if you did not have a brick and mortar retail location where you could physically take the client’s card with the raised numbers, place the card in a physical contraption with non-carbon triplicate forms that then embossed the card numbers onto the form, which the cardholder then physically signed, you were automatically deemed sketchy, probably a scam business.
Enter the community bank. Enter “A. Hardy Pickett!” But first, there was June Pickett.
1991 Goshen Opening Hunt
Frankie Pardoe, one of our first Equiery cov-er artists, was an ardent supporter and became a good friend and mentor to me. In 1991, she took me to see my first hunt, Goshen’s opening meet. I fell in love with every bit of it, leaving the meet determined to hunt! But the day yielded more. After the hounds had moved off, Frankie and Betty Ponds swept me along as they visited other ladies associated with the hunt, eventually stopping at Creekside—home of June and Hardy Pickett (Hardy, of course, was hunting). Gracious and welcoming, June was quickly sharing the stories behind every foxhunting photo on the walls, each of which featured family: husband, sons, daughters-in-law, and grandchildren.
Not long after that visit, I shared with Frankie The Equiery’s cash flow challenge and how demoralizing the institutional rejections were. Frankie urged me to call Hardy Pickett, VicePresident of Sandy Spring Bank. Me? Call a bank vice president? That sounded absurd. Why would he even take my call? Frankie assured me it would be ok, so I did.
Hardy Pickett: Vice President of Sandy Spring Bank, Horseman, Foxhunter
Nervous, feeling like the kid that I was, I called—and was shocked when I (or really The Equiery) was actually able to get an appointment with the vice president of a bank! Apparently, Hardy was already quite familiar with the young Equiery, as it had also not escaped his notice that one of The Equiery’s biggest clients (Oatland Stables, inside back cover) was owned by one of the bank’s largest shareholding families (a fact I only learned later)—and of course that family (Riggs/Keys) was intimately involved with the Goshen Hunt.
And yes, Hardy was able to solve our problem. “Now dear,” he said to me, “you are going to have to pay a little more in processing fees, but every year you are in good standing, that percentage will be reduced.” He wasn’t kidding! We paid 7.5% of each transaction that first year! It was our only option—and it worked. Our cash flow immediately “right sided” itself. As Hardy promised, each year our processing fees reduced until they became “industry standard.”
June and Hardy became The Equiery’s perennial cheerleaders, dropping in for every open house and community event we hosted. This kind of dedication, I have learned, is the essence of “community banking,” which Hardy epitomized. Over the years, I have heard countless stories from my clients, friends, fellow business and farm owners about how Hardy and Sandy Spring helped them at critical life stages. As regulations made community banking and personal relationships more challenging, Hardy took an early retirement, and he enjoyed every minute of it foxhunting all over until he hung up his spurs. He continued to enjoy fox-hunting vicariously through his sons and grand-children, eventually mentoring this new daugh-ter-in-law in my new chapter as a young Master.
On September 10, 2025, every Sandy Spring Bank client received in the mail their “conversion package” from the acquiring bank, Atlantic Union. Also on September 10, 2025, Hardy Pickett passed away. The demise of the community bank—the loss of the quintessential community banker.
Goodbye, Sandy Spring Bank. Goodnight, Master Pickett.
The Equiery is now owned by the Maryland Horse Council. As she turns 35, she seems to be enjoying a new chapter of her career under the stewardship of the MHC Vice President of Publications, Kim Egan. I am proud to see The Equiery once again become the trusted source of information, and equiery.com become the source for breaking news in the Maryland horse industry. Happy Birthday, Equiery!
