The Country Supply Story This Horse Tack Supplier is a Great American Story
of Hard Work and Dedication to Horse Owners

In our Country’s bicentennial year of 1976 the founder and co-owner of today’s Country Supply could be found peddling horse equipment out of the barn located behind his parent’s house. At the tender age of 14 he, with a few hundred dollars of financial backing from his parents, began buying and selling horse supplies and equipment to his neighbors. Scott learned early to satisfy customers because  he was selling products to were the same people that he rode horses with.

 After three summers of selling equipment out of the barn in the back yard our founder, Scott Mooney yearned for more. By this time Scott had reached the age of 16. He was old enough to drive so he figured he was old enough to become a local merchant in his hometown of Ottumwa, Iowa. He loaded up his horse equipment inventory from the barn and moved it into 300 square feet of rented space near downtown Ottumwa. Scott ran the store all day and went to night High School classes that were offered by the city’s school system. Being the store’s only employee, you could usually find him on any of the 7 days a week. He worked doing his high school homework next to the cash register.
 
The tack shop had only been open in town for a year when the movie Urban Cowboy with John Travolta kicked off a national fad of western clothing and music. Seeing the opportunity our founder, on limited funds and no established credit, began buying over-the-road western clothing salesman’s samples for cash and selling them in his tack shop. Sales were brisk and he reinvested every penny back into the business and moved into a newly built, 5600 square foot building in 1982.
 
Shortly after the move into the new building the Urban Cowboy craze began to cool off and so did western clothing sales. Scott, sitting at the kitchen table, came up with the idea to go into the catalog business selling horse equipment. He knew that without expanding his customer base going back to selling horse equipment was going to be to limiting.
 
Strapped for cash, Scott went to a local printer who offered to extend him credit enough to print his first catalog. The first catalog run was for 1,000, 12-page copies in black and white on uncoated paper. Friends would help Scott staple the catalogs together and type up address labels from finding names and addresses in phone books, classified ads and space ads from trade journals.
 
Soon Scott came across a company that had several thousand vegetable washing brushes that they could not sell as vegetable washing brushes. Scott saw that they would make great horse washing bushes so he offered the company a few cents apiece for what they had left. He named them the “Washer Groomer Brush” and ran space ads in several horse magazines.  He offered the brushes for FREE to anybody who would send in a dollar bill to cover the shipping and handling. Of course, a new catalog went out with each brush.

Now it was 1983 and Scott met Marthalee, the love of his life. Soon they were married and Scott and Marthalee took the reins of Country Supply. They both doted over the fledgling catalog sales company while it grew from only a few orders a day to several hundred a week. Scott and Marthalee were still operating the retail western clothing and tack store during the day while they would stitch together catalogs, stuff envelopes, sort mailings, do the accounting, answer the phone, and pack orders at night. Scott and Marthalee even spent the first 7 years of their marriage answering all of the company’s 800 number catalog order line calls 24 hours a day at their home all night.

The “corporate-culture” from day one for Country Supply is “Whatever It Takes”. It didn’t matter if you had to work all night, every night. It didn’t matter if you did without so that the company could afford equipment it needed to grow. Every phone call and every customer’s order were treated with a “do-or-die” urgency. Orders were always expected to get shipped on the day that the customer decided to buy. Scott and Marthalee would do whatever it took to get that done.

For the first several years of their marriage Scott and Marthalee only took out what they absolutely had to have to live on which amounted to less than $10,000 annually. In an effort to expand the selection of products available to their customers without increasing backorders, Country Supply purchased 2 used industrial sewing machines, pile fabric, and felt to start manufacturing custom saddle pads and girths for orders each day. Through the relentless day and night effort of Scott and Marthalee Country Supply continued to grow and in 1999 they were shipping over a thousand orders a week.
 
Space ran out in their retail store building so Scott and Marthalee purchased a 24,000 square foot skating rink on the edge of town and moved their store and warehouse into it. With the added space and a new computerized catalog fulfillment software program the company continued to grow to over 17 million in annual sales and was shipping as many as 1400 orders per day.

By 2001 Country Supply was mailing out over 4 million catalogs annually and was becoming a crushing pressure on most of the suppliers who were struggling to keep up with Country Supply’s demand for products. Scott and Marthalee prided themselves on bringing each of their customers the very best possible prices on quality products. They always have considered themselves “advocates for the horse owner”. They work hard to make sure that their customers are getting the very best deals available in the industry.
In 2001 Scott and Marthalee decided it was time to take Country Supply to the “next level”. They were swamped by thousands of requests from customers to supply them with even more new and different products. Scott and Marthalee were constantly lamenting over the fact that most of their suppliers had a hard enough time just keeping up with the demands of their current catalog sales. Scott and Marthalee decided it was time to give their customers what they want, so they outsourced the shipping of their catalog orders to a premium third party shipping company. This allowed Scott and Marthalee the time it would take to focus on the supply chain side of the company.
 
After over a year of researching, interviewing, and negotiating with several potential fulfillment centers, finally one was found that would take the same kind of care of the Country Supply customers as they had become accustom to receiving from Scott and Marthalee. The warehouse function was moved into the new 50,000 square foot fulfillment center in the fall of 2002 and a new corporate office was constructed to house the corporate staff. They would oversee the outsourced functions and the product sourcing and purchasing functions of the company.  The corporate headquarters building was strategically relocated on over 100 acres of ground that is ideal for product testing and catalog production. The new offices are located on the same farm that housed the original barn our founder began selling horse equipment when he was only 14.

Country Supply was then able to focus even more recourses on negotiating deals for their customers from their suppliers and sourcing new products and manufacturers. This new “refocusing” will begin to culminate in 2003 as hundreds of new items are being added to the product line and Scott and Marthalee are looking to turn the horse equipment industry on its ear again with the introduction of TackAuction.com. With this new website they will not only offer horse owners a place that they can buy and sell their used equipment free of charge. TackAuction.com will be the place where Country Supply can bring real supply and demand, lowest possible, large lot pricing to horse owners throughout the United States.
 
From a teenager’s sideline business in the back yard, to a seemingly impossible kitchen table “vision”, to a world leader in the horse supply mail order business, Country Supply is now poised to become a major supplier across all the distribution levels in the horse equipment industry. All of this was made possible because from the very beginning Country Supply has operated as a “customer-focused” company and has considered every order from its customers as a reaffirmation of a partnership to bring each horse owner the very best products on the lowest possible prices.

Scott and Marthalee’s most-memorable personal triumphs since we started the catalog business.

1985 - Finding out that on Wednesdays Bob’s Bargain Barn in our hometown had a scratch-and-dent grocery truck come in and they sold groceries for half price.

1985 - Figuring out that if you couldn’t afford somebody to push the snow in the parking lot that you could accomplish nearly the same thing if you drove back and forth across the parking area enough times.

1986 - Actually getting 18 orders in the mail on a Monday after mailing out an early catalog

1986 - Finding out that the local bank would actually put $3000.00 in our company checking account as a cash advance so we could pay suppliers if we took in our credit card

1987 - Getting a regular phone system so we didn’t have to pick up 2 or 3 phones to answer calls on the 3 identical $6.00 Wal-Mart phones we had on the wall. One for our national 800 number, one for our Iowa 800 number and one for local calls.

1988 - Finding a cardboard dealer who would sell us skids of overstocked boxes so Marthalee and I didn’t have to scavenger used boxes by going to the local grocery store on grocery-restocking day and picking them up in the isles each week.

1989 - Finishing the retyping 17,000 customer names and addresses into our first, real mail order software program in which time Marthalee and I took turns typing and sleeping on the office floor 24 hours a day for 10 days.

1990 - Getting a regular catalog printer to take our printing work so we didn’t have to collate, stitch, label and mail sort our own catalogs. This allowed us to ink jet addresses on our catalogs so we didn’t have to sit in front of our dot matrix printer for up to 18 hours straight and make sure it didn’t jam because we had to restart at the beginning if it did.

1990 - Cellular phone service came to Ottumwa so we could take orders on weekends in the car or at family gatherings so we were able to actually attend functions at other people’s houses.
1991 - Our first 1 million in annual sales.

1992 - Being able to afford a new computer after spending 2 years with a computer that had to have at least 78-degree heat in the office before it would come on.

1993 - Getting enough phone orders to be able to afford to hire an evening employee to answer the phone and take orders from 5pm till Midnight Monday through Friday.

1994 - Finally finishing the digitizing and colorizing the Country Supply catalog. Using a PC with a copy of Photoshop and Quark Express and a desktop scanner. I cropped and colorizing each image and retyped each product’s catalog copy. 6 weeks of only 2-4 hours sleep each night to meet a Holiday catalog-printing deadline.

1998 - Moving into the new warehouse and putting our operation onto a world class ERP program by spending 6 months of 18 hour days.

2003 - Taking our first vacation since our 3-day honeymoon nearly 20 years ago.

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PO Box 369
Louisiana, Missouri 63353

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