The company that became HGE was started in 2005 by three people who wanted to do things differently: two Indian entrepreneurs and a Frenchman who had spent years as a product engineer with Decathlon. We had met the year before. The idea was simple to say and hard to do — build a workshop in India that worked to European production standards, and followed the way the good European houses actually organised their production, rather than the way things were usually done here.

Our first products were bridlework and saddles. The very first saddle we made was a racing saddle. One of our first customers was JMR in Belgium, and it was through customers like them that we learned. We were taught to make equestrian goods by some of the best names in the world, and we started with leather only, because that was what we knew and wanted to master.