Frank BainesSaddlery

Frank Baines started making saddles from his kitchen table in Walsall in 1981 with his wife Jane after a fire disrupted his earlier trade, having begun his saddlery apprenticeship in 1964 at the age of fifteen. The business moved to a proper workshop on Northcote Street in 1987 and built a reputation among dressage, showjumping and eventing riders for handcrafted saddles cut to individual measurements. Frank retired in 2016, and the saddlery is now run by his children, Garry and Victoria Baines, who oversee a team of saddlers continuing the same hand-cutting and stitching methods. Customers can specify details through the company's own online saddle-configuration tool before a saddler builds the piece by hand in Walsall, a town whose leather trade runs back centuries.