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GLYNDON, Minn. — The smell of old leather.

It’s the first thing you notice when stepping into the home workshop of

Brassy Bit Tack.

And then you see two 30-something women, who look strikingly alike, laughing and talking. One of them, Cadie Craddock, is obviously on a mission, as she strides quickly from table to table with bits of leather and tools in hand. The other, her identical twin Calie Lindseth, sits at the big center table, which is where big pieces of leather can be measured, cut and prepared to either build or repair saddles.

Flashing carbon-copy grins, they announce a friendly collective greeting.

“Welcome to the crazy adventure that is

Brassy Bit Tack!

” Craddock says. Or maybe it’s Lindseth. They look and sound so alike that it’s hard to keep track.

At a time when many local horse-tack shops are closing or their owners are retiring, these high-energy millennials have updated an old craft by creating an e-commerce site to sell its inventory around the world.

“Covid hit and we were accidentally prepared,” Lindseth says. “Our business model is completely online. It was very natural progression for us to develop a new trade with a modern presence. ”

“We have saddles in every inhabited continent,” Craddock says. “We ship about 200 items internationally annually.”

Brassy Bit focuses on recycling, repairing and reselling bits, bridles, reins, saddle pads, vintage or antique tack, and almost any other type of horse gear you can imagine. Along the way, Brassy Bit also spawned a spinoff,

CL Saddlewear,

so now Craddock also fixes old saddles and custom-builds new ones.

That helps explain Craddock’s busy-bee vibe. She has a saddle repair job that needs to be done by that afternoon, so needs to work while visiting.

The siblings operate from Craddock’s 10-acre farmstead in Spring Valley Township, northeast of Glyndon, where they keep multiple horses, a talkative Anatolian shepherd named Kara, a super-sweet pitbull and several cats of varying sizes, colors and temperaments.

In addition to the basement workshop, there’s a large steel building where they keep “tens of thousands” of pieces of tack organized like you’d find in any large-scale brick-and-mortar. There’s also around 500 different bits, one of the area’s largest collections of vintage horse tack and 160 saddles, ranging in price from $99 to $5,800.

They sell 10 to 15 saddles every week and the majority of them are to places around the U.S. or the world.

More recently, they’ve invested in a 27-foot trailer to bring a mobile store to horse shows, tack swaps and vendor fairs around the region.

In between saddle-making, tack repair and tack sales, there’s fitting appointments, the care of their own homes and animals and their full-time jobs as well.

It’s a busy life, but it’s heaven to these two, who routinely finish each others sentences and seem to genuinely like each other.

They are, in their own words, “just horse-crazy little girls who never grew up.”

The girls were practically kneehigh to a Shetland pony when they started riding themselves. Raised in western Nebraska, they had horses for everything from showing in 4-H, working cattle or riding for the sheer thrill of it.

In fact, today, the sisters both have paint horses who are direct descendants of the horses they owned as kids and both speak of those equine ancestors with a passion and affection that has never dimmed.

Between the two of them, they own 13 horses, including paints, quarterhorses, a donkey and several “broke-down thoroughbreds,” whose racing days are behind them.

As the girls grew older, they became especially close. Both moved to North Dakota to attend school. After 12 years in the North Dakota National Guard and postgraduate studies, Lindseth is now the women veterans’ coordinator for the state of North Dakota. She’s also earning her doctorate in public health, with an emphasis on mental health.

Craddock, meanwhile, has been a long-time finance and insurance manager for Muscatell Subaru in Moorhead.

The twosome even wound up being rural neighbors. The Lindseths were already living on a farmstead northwest of Glyndon when the Craddocks moved to a small farmstead nearby.

When the 10-acre property next door became available, the Craddocks jumped at the chance.

The new spread was ideal for horses but uninhabitable for humans. “It was one step above foreclosure and one step above condemned,”  Lindseth says. 

But with the help of Lindseth, her husband Thomas, and Thomas’ very handy dad, Ted, they have transformed it into a space of soaring ceilings and modern fixtures. “It turned out to be a really beautiful property,” Lindseth says.

Even through their adult lives, the sisters continued riding. But after years of changing riding disciplines and horses or accommodating different riders, they joked they’d stockpiled enough tack to start their own store.

The twins, along with Lindseth’s sister-in-law, Amanda Lindseth, decided to hold a garage sale — and were delighted when it was a galloping success.

In the span of 1 ½ years, the threesome would hold three successful garage sales of horse tack.

By then, they realized there really was a demand for what they collected.

They also knew that their own experiences outfitting horses had taught them a lot about what worked — and what didn’t — with their own horses. Maybe they had valuable information to share with other riders.

Some female bonding and a little wine on a Kentucky Derby weekend gave them the final push they needed. “We had just got done watching the race and we said, ‘Ladies, maybe we’re onto something,” Lindseth says.

“It was also this really conscious excuse for the three of us to have a reason to always come back to each other,” Craddock says. “It was a shared interest …”

“And to do something as sisters,” Lindseth interjects.

“And it was something to come home to,” Craddock adds. “It was really this whimsical thing that we thought we could do out of a garage.”

With that, Brassy Bit was born.

The business started out humbly, with 18 saddles in Amanda’s garage. But in 2019, after Amanda moved to the United Kingdom, the operation was relocated to Craddock’s basement.

This basement workshop is filled with fascinating tools, machinery and horse tack. The morning sun pours through a south window, winking off the handles of dozens of silver leather-working tools nestled in a wooden block. Metal shapes, which look like giant cookie cutters, hang from a wall. Heavy-duty shelves hold piles of saddles and glittering clumps of bridles — all awaiting cleaning or repair.

Lindseth’s specialty is bitting, and she has a special weakness for custom bits. “Sometimes, she buys bits just to touch them,” reads her bio on Brassy Bit’s website.

She also buys and tracks Brassy Bit’s inventory, manages the e-commerce site and takes professional studio shots of every piece of equipment they post.

Craddock’s roles include accountant, customer service, chief saddle-fitting expert and saddle-builder and repairperson.

She’s learned the trade from

Cliff Langerud,

a Barnesville man who has become known for his high-quality, meticulously made saddles. She’d initially approached him eight years ago with the hope he could help out with saddle repair and, before she knew it, was spending hours entranced as she watched him expertly practice his craft.

“Cadie just showed up in his basement and never left,” Lindseth says, laughing.

After months of Craddock hauling piles of saddles to Langerud, he said: “I don’t know why you’re paying me to do this. You can do this … I’ll teach you.”

A mentor-apprentice relationship began. Craddock soaked up as much of his knowledge as possible, noting how he used only the best-made materials and didn’t skimp on quality. For instance, Langerud always used real animal hide vs. the cheaper chipped substitutes and used hides that were properly tanned so they’d last longer.

In 2019, after countless hours of observation, Langerud turned to her one day and said: “Cadie, I want to go fishing.”

Translation: He wanted to retire and was looking to pass the saddle-making torch. The sisters bought out his equipment and now Langerud drops by and visits her shop like she used to frequent his. “Now he comes by a couple of hours a week and he tells me what I did wrong,” she says, laughing. “And sharpens my knives, because I hate the grinder.”

While Langerud did everything by hand, Craddock has found less labor-intensive ways to make saddles without sacrificing quality. She’s invested in machines like an automatic strap cutter, an edger and a 14-ton clicker press, a die-cutting machine which uses templates to quickly cut out shapes in leather.

But in some cases, the oldies really are the goodies. Craddock’s pride and joy is Bertha, the hulking, antique sewing machine once owned by Langerud. Bertha is a 1942 Army Air Corps Singer, originally used to sew parachutes. The heavy machine also was built sturdily enough to be crated up and dropped from a plane so troops could repair rigging.

“Seriously, she’s my most prized possession” Craddock says, nodding toward the bulky machine near the entrance. “She lives there because if my house caught on fire I could call Thomas and have him plow through my wall with his Skidsteer and rescue her.”

Even with trusty warhorses like Bertha, it can take up to 300 hours to make an especially intricate saddle, Craddock says. “There’s so much to them,” she says. “They start as a roll of leather and a piece of wood.”

While Craddock handles most of the saddlework, Lindseth does step in to give her sister’s creations extra flair. She uses a mallet and different leather tools to painstakingly pound sunflowers, roses and other decorative flourishes to each custom-built saddle.

It’s slow, intricate work, but Lindseth finds it strangely therapeutic. “This was a weird kind of a nice getaway from some of the demands of what this business can be,” she says.

Once any saddle, used or new, leaves the shop, it’s been inspected and safety tested.

The sisters stress that safety is a big priority for their businesses. They point out that the proper fit of a saddle is as important to horse and rider as properly fitting shoes are to human beings. All horses are built differently and factors like gender, individual preferences and age can play a role in what people expect from their saddle, the sisters say.

“We’ve actually found a market of middle-aged women who love horses and are getting to the point in their lives where they can kind of be the horse-crazy little girls again,” Lindseth says. “Weight is a big thing. They can’t throw a 40-pound saddle on a horse anymore.”

Why is it so important for a saddle to fit? An ill-fitting saddle can hurt a horse to the point where they buck or throw riders.

“The big thing I say to a lot of folks is that, at the end of the day, we’re fitting people’s kids,” Craddock says. “If we don’t create an ethical, safe environment, people’s kids could be literally hurt.”

It’s one reason Brassy Bit’s saddle-fitting services — at $100 a session — have long waiting lists. Craddock is a professionally trained saddle fitter through the United Kingdom’s revered

Society of Master Saddlers

, so she is qualified to oversee fittings for both western and English-style riders.

As the United States doesn’t really offer an industry standard for the proper fit of saddles, it’s up to individual practitioners to help educate riders.

“It’s really up to us as a practitioner to be sure the work we’re putting into the world is really quality, educational and ethical,” Craddock says. “It isn’t something that’s required of us, but we’re really, really passionate about increasing the safety of the folks we’re encountering through our business.”

At the same time, they don’t want to limit horse-ownership solely to wealthy people who can afford only the finest horses and costliest equipment.

It’s one reason they will sell lower-priced saddles. “You can have a nice, older, inspected, $400 or $500 saddle and that gets that kiddo started and fits their horse and everyone is having a good time,” Lindseth says.

Adds Craddock: “We want to make sure that access is safe, equitable and not gatekept.”

That’s just one guiding tenet for their business. Another is to work with as many women-owned businesses as possible. Yet another is to encourage younger people to explore a very old craft that might otherwise be forgotten.

“If our generation or a younger generation doesn’t take an interest in it, it will die,” Craddock says. “So much of this, this is how the West was won. Or built. This is the story of us.”

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