Sticks and Stones

Stone Horses -- the range of model horses started by former Breyer employee Peter Stone after he left Breyer -- are peculiar things.  A lot of people have some very strong opinions about them:  either they're the best thing since sliced bread and precious beyond pearls, or they're the most hideous creations ever made and not worth what you pay for them.  People like to cast sticks and stones at things they don't approve of.  It's very likely that the truth, as always, lies somewhere in between.

Stone Horses perpetually puzzle me.  I was lucky enough to be in there at the beginning, in 1997, when the company was just getting started, and I was initially enthused about the idea that these were intended to be "Model Horses for Real Horse People" and "As Real as the Horses Themselves" which seemed to promise realistic horse replicas, all in scale with one another, painted in realistic colours.  And initially they were just that -- the First Editions of most of the early Stones were portraits of actual horses, and the follow-ups came in natural colours.

An early Stone Morgan

However, the emphasis on realism didn't last long.  First there were Stones, and then there were Precious Stones -- model horses in gem-like colours.  The Stone Company simply could not resist (and who can blame them?) riffing on the word "stone."  Thus, their first newsletter was known as the Equilith (literally "stone horse"), and when they began to introduce new smaller scales they called them Pebbles and Chips.  Collectors then turned the Chips into the equivalent of potato chips -- betcha can't buy just one.

For plastic ponies, Stones are indeed eye-poppingly expensive, but this is probably because of the company's determination to remain a home-grown product -- cast and decorated in the state of Indiana.  American workers must be paid American wages, and the cost of production trickles down to consumers via the cost per item.  This is not to say that some of the prices may not be artificially inflated -- I do believe that Stone Horses are continually testing what the market will pay.

However, the introduction of Stone Horses did introduce a kind of market competition that worked out well for the model horse fancier:  to put it simply, Stone's techniques upped the stakes of the game.  No one could deny the superiority of the Stone's paint jobs to Breyer's factory output at the time before Stones.  After Stones, Breyer simply began to paint better.  Similarly, Stone's use of hobby artists to sculpt, design, and sometimes even decorate their horses, may have provided the prompting Breyer needed to search further afield in pursuit of equine sculptors after their experiments in turning over sculpting duties to a series of flatwork artists fell on the market with a resounding thud.

A One-Of-A-Kind Stone Horse

My problems with Stones really amount to my sense that Stone offers too much of a good thing, like ruining a dessert by serving you a massive portion of it.  Take factory customizations, for example.  At first Stone offered a few limited options to switch out manes and tails, change gender, tweak an ear or move a neck on a basic model.  Now they will do almost anything you or they can imagine to a given sculpture.  Some of the manes and tails they have come out with are ridiculous -- blowing about as if the horse were standing in the midst of a tornado, or reaching lengths that would be impractical even if you could get your horse to grow such a heavy head of hair.

Design-wise, Stone has also gone overboard with fantasy paint jobs.  Breyer has its oddball holiday horses -- for Halloween in particular -- but also for Christmas, Valentine's Day and the Fourth of July.  Stone has holiday patterns for New Year's Day, Valentine's Day, the Super Bowl, St. Patrick's Day, Spring, Easter, the Fourth of July and other Americana, Summer, Shark Week, Autumn, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Winter and Christmas.  They have horses with horns, horses with bird wings, horses with bat wings, horses with insect wings, insect legs, rabbit ears and deer antlers.  It's all just too much.

Getting back to the Stone prices -- because they specialize in one-of-a-kinds (OOAKs) and very small limited edition runs, they have very few opportunities to make a profit on a popular horse.  Hundreds may like a particular OOAK, and thousands get enthused over a run of 25, but that only gives Stone fewer than 26 opportunities to make money on their creations.  This must inevitably result in higher prices that will be paid as demand is sure to outstrip availability.

But while I can rationalize the price of the average Stone horse, that doesn't necessarily mean that I approve.  As a result, although I've seen many Stone horses that I like and admire, I don't necessarily feel a burning need to own them.  As Stone has changed over the years, so too has my interest in them.  When they first came out with large runs and realistic colours, some even available in retail stores, I was content enough with those.  As Stone started producing more and more special runs, though, it became increasingly apparent that more care was lavished on the finishing of the specials than on the ones you could buy new in box.  But then special runs started to be produced in ever-decreasing numbers, making them harder to get.

My first Stone Design-A-Horse

The solution, for me, was the Stone Design-A-Horse program.  If you don't want any factory customization on a body and you can be happy with ordinary (although well-executed) horse colours, ordering a Design-A-Horse if often cheaper than buying anything else on the website.  You give up the instant gratification of buying a ready-made horse, but you get the opportunity to create the horse that you want, which may end up being an OOAK -- you never know.  They're technically not OOAK, but they're certainly the next best thing, and available at only a fraction of the price.

Whether or not you approve of Stone's way of doing business and its focus on enticing the collector of the weird, exotic and/or rare, they do offer a number of options in a variety of price ranges.  Yes, if you compare Stone Chips to Breyer Stablemates, and the Traditional-scaled models of both companies, the Stones are vastly more expensive.  But Breyer does not offer routine customization of the Design-A-Horse sort -- currently, the only way you can get a factory customized Breyer made to your own specifications is to indulge in the Ultimate Breyer Experience -- a $5,000 trip that includes a hotel stay and a tour of the Breyer factory, along with your custom-painted model packed in a customized box featuring your own write-up about the horse.  That's a lot more than some people want or can afford.

Plastic to plastic, comparing Breyers to Stones is a bit like comparing apples to oranges, or maybe sweet maraschinos to  sour cherries.  One is a treat that reminds you of ice cream; the other isn't for all tastes and you have to be prepared to work around the stone.