Contents
The horse in the wrong place.
Ride anywhere.

Introduction
What this brand is, and how to use this book.
What this is
Riding-standard boots, coats and saddle leather, cut for the city and shot with a flash at night.
Vision
The label that made the horse modern again.
How to use this brandbook
This book is the single source of truth for Écurie. It is a living document, not a PDF: it is versioned, and the version you are reading is stated on the cover. Read the strategy before the visual rules — almost every rule here follows from something decided in it. Anything not covered: ask before inventing. A gap is a question, never a licence.
Brand foundation
The convictions everything downstream answers to.
The horse in the wrong place.
- Purpose
- The brand in as few words as possible — what every decision is checked against.
- Usage
- Inside the company: briefs, reviews, onboarding. Not printed as a line.
Belief
The strangest image in the room is the honest one.
Mission
Take the stable's craft out of the stable.
Positioning & USP
Made in the stable. Worn everywhere else.
Brand promise
Gear made to riding standard, cut for the rest of the night.
Boots made on a riding last, tested in the saddle before the shop
Saddle leather from a 90-year-old tannery
Brass hardware cast from the horseshoe
Repaired and resoled at the stable
One drop a season, shot in one night
Ride anywhere.
- Purpose
- The promise, said in one breath to the outside world.
- Usage
- End of films and campaigns, packaging, the website hero, beside the logo in a lockup.
Category point of view
Equestrian brands sell tradition to people who ride. Fashion brands borrow the horse as a print. Nobody makes the real gear for the people who find the horse strange and beautiful.
Frame of reference
Hermès's saddlery roots with the night-flash surrealism of today's editorial photography — the audience already follows it, and nobody has made clothes from it.
Differentiation
Equestrian brands sell tradition and fashion borrows the horse as a print. Écurie makes the real gear and photographs the real horse in the wrong place.
Nerve
Craft
Strangeness
Audience
The people the brand is built for. Every decision traces back here.
Core consumer group
The night crowd — follows editorial photography more than fashion news, and wants clothes with a story strange enough to repeat.
Target audience
Editorially minded 22–38-year-olds and riders who want out of the tack shop.
Functional & emotional benefits
Real riding gear that works at dinner, and clothes with a story worth repeating.
Brand strategy
How the brand is organised, and the rules the product obeys.
Brand architecture
Branded house. Écurie is the label; drops are named after the place the campaign was shot, and nothing is sub-branded.
Product philosophy
Made on a riding last, because a boot that fails in the saddle fails everywhere. Saddle leather from a ninety-year-old tannery, brass cast from the horseshoe, soles that come off and go back on. Nothing is styled to look equestrian; it is equestrian, and then it is worn to dinner.
Naming & nomenclature
The label is Écurie, always with the accent: the drawn wordmark when it is the mark, Écurie in running text. Products take stable words: Box, Tack, Halter, Yard. Never Écurie Equestrian, never ÉCURIE® in copy.
20-year roadmap
2026 — the label, the first drop, the stable store with the repair bench in the middle. 2028 — a Paris stockist and a night campaign shot in a city nobody expects. 2031 — a resale channel for boots that have already been resoled twice.
Communication platform
What the brand says, and how the same message survives every format.
Made in the stable. Worn everywhere else.
- Purpose
- The one thing every message has to leave behind.
- Usage
- The website's opening line, pitch decks, press releases, the first sentence of sales copy.
The stable — a real workshop, a riding last, a repair bench. For the rider.
The night — one impossible image per drop, shot with a flash. For the night crowd.
The wrong place — gear that works in the saddle and at dinner. For everyone else.
Product messaging framework
Every product is described in the same order: what it is · the leather and the last · what it does in the saddle · what can be resoled or repaired · what it costs. Never a heritage story before the object.
Language system
Products are named after the parts of a stable: Box, Tack, Halter, Yard. Drops are named after the place the campaign was shot.
Message translation
The rider — lead with the last, the leather and the resoling. The night crowd — lead with the image and the place it was shot. Stockist — lead with sell-through, the drop rhythm and the repair service.
Brand manifesto
Take the horse where it should not be. Keep the craft exactly where it is.
Tone & impact
How the brand sounds — and what that makes possible.
Tone of voice
Ride anywhere.
Short, strange, confident.
Tone principles
Short, strange, confident. Says one thing and leaves.
Tone spectrum
From a caption under a strange photograph to a line shouted across a yard. Never a lecture about tradition.
Ride anywhere.
Made in the stable. Worn everywhere else.
The horse in the wrong place.
Resoled, not replaced.
A riding last, a city pavement.
Flash, then stillness.
What this enables
A store in a former stable, a repair bench in the middle of it, and a horse in the yard on Saturdays.
Brand narrative
Equestrian brands sell tradition to people who ride, and fashion borrows the horse as a print. Nobody makes the real thing for people who find the horse strange and beautiful. Écurie is Swedish for hoof, and for a royal court. The gear comes from the stable; the pictures put the horse where it should not be — a tower block, a living room, a swamp at night — and the strangeness is the point.
Strategic do's and don'ts
Do write in short lines. Do put the horse where it should not be. Don't show a rosette, a trophy or a paddock fence.
Logotype
The mark, the room it needs, and how it must never be used.
- Always one colour, never outlined, never stretched.
The cap height of the wordmark on every side. No other element may enter the dashed area — not type, not an image edge, not a partner mark.
The dashed line is the margin from the layout system. The mark never crosses it, and never sits closer to another element than its own clear space.
The divider is one grid unit; the partner mark is scaled to match the optical height of ours, never the literal height. Neither mark may sit inside the other's clear space. Where a partner's own guidelines conflict with these, theirs govern their mark and ours governs ours.
Colour
Roles before values. Every combination is contrast-checked.
Derived from the core colours — never hand-picked.
Every ratio below is computed, not claimed.
- Flash on Stable 16.4:1
- Stable on Flash 16.4:1
- Midnight on Flash 12.2:1
- Flash on Midnight 12.2:1
- Stable on Dusk 5.7:1
- Dusk on Stable 5.7:1
- Flash on Paddock 4.2:1
- Paddock on Flash 4.2:1
- Midnight on Dusk 4.2:1
- Dusk on Midnight 4.2:1
- Stable on Paddock 3.9:1
- Paddock on Stable 3.9:1
- Flash on Dusk 2.9:1
- Dusk on Flash 2.9:1
- Midnight on Paddock 2.9:1
- Paddock on Midnight 2.9:1
- Dusk on Paddock 1.5:1
- Paddock on Dusk 1.5:1
- Midnight on Stable 1.4:1
- Stable on Midnight 1.4:1
- Motion. With reduced motion switched on, nothing moves: no slides, no 30 px entrances. Fades up to 100 ms stay, everything else is still.
- Text size. Body text no smaller than 16 px on screen and 9 pt in print. Captions 13 px at the least.
- Images. Every image that carries meaning has alt text that says what it shows and why it is there. Decorative images have empty alt text.
- Colour alone. Colour never carries meaning on its own — a status, an error, a link also has a word, an icon or an underline.
Surface carries the page, ink carries the words, and the accent is spent once. A layout where the accent competes with the surface is the most common way this system goes wrong.
Typography
A display face for presence, a text face for reading.
| Style | Size | Line height | Tracking | Sample |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Display | 76 px | 0.95 | -0.03em | Écurie |
| H1 | 54 px | 1.0 | -0.02em | Écurie |
| H2 | 38 px | 1.1 | -0.02em | Écurie |
| H3 | 27 px | 1.2 | -0.01em | Écurie |
| Body | 17 px | 1.6 | 0 | Écurie |
| Caption | 13 px | 1.5 | 0.02em | Écurie |
The same page, set to the scale in this book
Display carries the argument; the text face carries the evidence. Nothing in a layout should need a third size that is not on the scale — if it does, the hierarchy is the problem, not the type.
Iconography
Stroke weight, corner treatment, and the grid icons are drawn on.
Principles
Solid, cut from a single shape, like tack hardware.
Icons are drawn on a 24 px artboard with a 2 px keyline, on the same 8 px base unit as every other measurement in the system. Square shapes fill the keyline; circular shapes overshoot it slightly so the two read at the same optical size.
Art direction
How imagery is chosen, treated and cropped.
Principles
Direct flash at night or deep blue hour, 35mm grain. A real horse in the wrong place: tower blocks, a 1970s living room, a swamp, the roof of a car. One impossible detail per frame, otherwise documentary.














Material language
How the brand speaks about what it is made of — without overclaiming.
Philosophy
Saddle leather, waxed cotton, brass, wool melton.



Grid & spacing
The layout system every surface inherits.
System
Full bleed. Photographs take the whole screen; type sits in the corner at poster scale.
| Token | Value |
|---|---|
| Corner radius | 0 |
| Base unit | 8px |
| Columns | 12 |
| Margin | 0 |
| Max width | 1600px |
Motion
How the brand moves — easing, tempo, and what motion is for.
Principles
A fast cut, then stillness. Like a flash going off.
Transform and opacity only. Every motion has a still equivalent: with reduced motion switched on, nothing on this page moves.
Packaging
Look, material, finishing — and the feeling of opening it.
Direction
A midnight blue box wrapped in a waxed cotton strap with a brass horseshoe buckle.
Substrate & print
Rigid board in midnight blue with the wordmark printed in dusk orange. A waxed cotton strap with a brass buckle instead of tape. Tissue in unbleached cotton, no plastic.



Brand in use
The identity where people actually meet it.
Ride anywhere.
See the rangeBlack, one flash photograph per screen, the name set tall in the corner.
Digital
Black site, one flash photograph per screen, the name marked in the corner. The repair booking sits next to the product.
One flash frame per post, captioned with a place name. Never a rosette, a trophy or a paddock fence.
Ride anywhere.
Out of home · 3×6 mNight Ride: horses in tower blocks, living rooms and swamps, shot with direct flash.
Midnight blue uncoated stock, the mark in flash white, the marker name screen-printed so the ink sits thick.
Merchandise
What the brand puts its name on when it does not have to.

A brass horseshoe buckle, a waxed cotton tote, a wool stable blanket with the mark woven in.
Application rules
The running horse woven or embroidered small, never printed. The wordmark only on paper and painted surfaces, always in dusk orange on midnight. One mark per object.
Environment & signage
The brand at architectural scale.

A former stable: boxes as fitting rooms, hay on the concrete, one horse on Saturdays.
Materials & fabrication
Painted timber stable doors in midnight blue with the wordmark hand-painted in dusk orange. Brass hardware. Lit at night by one hard light, never backlit.

