Who are we

We are Anne (right) and Eva van Ekelenburg; two sisters who have both been active in equestrian sports all our lives. Training horses and ponies together is our great passion and we have been doing this for years with great pleasure. Unfortunately, in early 2021 things went completely wrong during Anne's training with one of our (best!) ponies. Anne fell due to sheer bad luck and remained unconscious on the floor for almost fifteen minutes.

Once in the hospital, Anne seemed to recover somewhat, but after a scan, no less than 4 hemorrhages were found in different places in her brain. A long, uncertain period of rehabilitation started and Anne is still working on that every day.

After overcoming the initial shock, we started a search for the answer to the question: why didn't the cap Anne wore protect her enough against these serious consequences? Then we soon discovered that brain injuries of this nature are unfortunately not so exceptional at all.

The caps that we always wore until then did protect us against a hard blow or impact from the outside so that our skull would not break, but the vast majority of brain injuries after a fall occur because your brain (which has a jelly-like substance) acts as it was 'bouncing around' inside your skull. As a result, your brain suffers internal bruising and bleeding, as it were. This was also the case with Anne.

Fortunately, Swedish neurosurgeon Hans von Holst has done a tremendous amount of work in this area. He saw so many brain injuries of this nature that he developed the 'Multidirection Impact Protection System', also known as the MIPS system. The bottom line is that thanks to this system, the cap offers better protection against blows to the head from different angles, so that brain damage from a fall is even better prevented. MIPS is added to a cap in the form of a low-friction layer that sits between the outer shell and the helmet liner. As a result, the helmet can slide relative to the head when impacted from different angles. The research results are very clear: with the MIPS system in your cap, the risk of brain injury is considerably smaller.

This is also the reason why we offer many safety caps with the innovative MIPS system. This system is already widely used in bicycle, motorcycle and ski helmets and is now fortunately also starting to penetrate equestrian sports.

In addition to a cap, safety bars are an absolute must, of course. You will also find them in our shop. Because we know better than anyone that the eye also wants something and 'safety' does not always equate to 'beautiful' (and fortunately Anne has not lost her obsession with beautiful products) we have only selected products that we fully support ourselves; both in terms of looks and comfort and safety.