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One of our clients is a family-run equestrian business called Shadow Horse, established in 2011, which sources and sells equipment for horse riding.
They came to us in 2016 with a request to patent a bridle they had designed in order to combat a problem they came across regularly. Many of the bridles on the market were actually quite uncomfortable for horses, and their design introduced a softer piece of leather, positioned carefully to give the bridle a little more flexibility and make it more comfortable.
The problem with submitting patent applications for equestrian bridles is that we’ve been domesticating horses for a long time – about 5 or 6 thousand years. In that time, there have been a lot of bridle designs – pretty much everything has been tried at some point, and the distinctions between them are quite subtle.
In addition, because new patent applications for bridles aren’t seen very often, examiners are not as familiar with the components and workings of them as they were in the past.
Understanding that there were already a lot of patents in existence for bridles, we knew we would need to explain very clearly why this one was different.
Our client talked about the bridle being “flexible”, but we knew that this wasn’t something we could use to sufficiently differentiate the new design. We had to go into more detail and define exactly which bits were flexible, how this flexibility was achieved, and why this mattered.
We decided to use the phrase ‘articulated linkage’, and in the application included several diagrams. We had to explain what all the different parts were, how they worked together and how this was different to other bridles.
We submitted applications in the UK, Europe and the US, and each application required a slightly different approach. We also came across different sets of objections and different processes and timelines.
In each case we were able to have conversations with the examiner about the application, so that we could fully understand their objections and thought processes and we could respond accordingly with more detailed explanations if needed.
The patent was granted in the UK in 2022, Europe in 2024 and US in February 2025.
