You might have heard about the equestrian challenges offered by Equisarte Shows and wondered how they work and if they are legit or not. We have participated in two of their recent riding challenges and have a review to share with you!
Equisarte Shows popped up on our radar last summer after a couple of the girls at our lesson barn completed the Spring riding challenge. Each participant received a gorgeous ribbon that they brought to the farm to photograph with their favorite lesson ponies. Intrigued by the beautiful prizes, we decided to take a closer look at their challenges!
What is an Equisarte Challenge?
Equisarte Shows offers different challenges throughout the year. They offer a mixture of riding and horsemanship challenges, as well pet photography contests.
Just like a real horse show (or photo contest), there are REAL prizes! See below for more about that.
How much does Equisarte charge for its challenges?
The cost varies. We participated in two challenges: the summer riding challenge and the No Stirrup November Challenge. The summer challenge was $40 and the November challenge was $35.
How do you sign up for an Equisarte equestrian challenge?
Head over to the Equisarte website to sign up. Each challenge typically accepts a limited number of signups (for example one of our challenges was open to the first 500 participants). If you see a challenge that you REALLY want to join, I recommend signing up right away to reserve your spot.
What prizes can you win from Equisarte?
The most frequently offered prize for completing an Equisarte equestrian is a ribbon. The ribbons, in our experience, are beautiful and large. They are really pretty and a great prize to earn and display! Each challenge offers a new and unique ribbon that is different from previous challenge prizes.
How do you earn and receive your ribbon from Equisarte?
Once you sign up for an Equisarte Challenge, you can download and print an activity log. As you work towards completing the challenge, you will fill out your progress on the log.
Each challenge runs for a different amount of time. Equisarte has a very active (and supportive!) Facebook group that you can join if you’d like. This group is a great place for some accountability and encouragement!
At the end of the challenge, you take a picture of (or scan) your log and send it to the email address that Equisarte provides.
A few weeks later, your ribbon/prize arrives in the mail!
Equisarte Review: Our Experience
As I stated above, my daughter has participated in 2 Equisarte challenges in the last year. Both of the challenges were really great experiences!
Signing up was easy to do and the provided instructions for completing the challenge and submitting the log were easy to understand.
The summer challenge was a great motivator for lots of extra horse time. Her log included riding at home, at lessons and at horse shows. Her horse time was not just riding, but also in-hand work.
The ribbon that arrived after completing that challenge was absolutely breathtaking!
Following the summer challenge, we signed up for the No Stirrup November challenge. No Stirrup November has been a popular equestrian challenge for many years! So we were very familiar with it, but this challenge added some extra fun and incentive to it!
All time spent riding without stirrups was logged and another beautiful ribbon earned.
We found these challenges to be a lot of fun! They aren’t super cheap, but knowing how much just the ribbons alone cost helped to justify the price. PLUS! Equisarte gives a portion of the proceeds from these challenges to various equine charities. All in all, they are a good cause, a great motivator, and you get a cool prize at the end!
Have you tried any of the Equisarte Challenges? If so, how did it go? We’d love to hear about your experience! Feel free to tell us about it in the comments!
I sign up for every Equisarte challenge that comes along. Not only do I agree with your review, but I would also like to add that the Facebook group is the only one I’ve seen that is drama-free with all positive interactions.
You are right! The FB group is wonderful! Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts. 🙂