Evaluating Your Collection

 It's a new year and with a new year comes a bit of a stock take. I do think it's important at times to go over what you own and start to think about where there are gaps and where your focus should be for the next year. This is particularly true if, like me, you're a regular shower who doesn't really have any specialism and just likes to have all the pretty things!

The main focus of this post is going to be evaluating your collection with regards to having a well balanced show string, but this can be used in lots of other ways too :)

So here is my guide to start evaluating your collection.

Step 1: Cataloguing

If you haven't catalogued your collection then this is your cue to start. You need to catalogue your collection from day one. On a very basic level if your house burns down and you don't know what you have you won't be able to claim on the insurance, so please catalogue!

There are tonnes of different ways you can go about doing this (and I've already written loads of tutorials on it) but here are the three main ways:

1. Paper catalogue
2. Spreadsheet
3. Specialist software

Some people do still like to do a paper catalogue, either in a binder, notebook or one of the specialist model horse cataloguing planners. This is a lovely way to do it and looks beautiful but it can be time consuming, it is also not much help if it burns with your house (you should have a fire proof box in your house where you can keep important documents, if you are paper cataloguing and don't have one, get one).

A spreadsheet (either excel, sheets or similar) is probably the most popular option. I've done a tutorial on it here. 

Finally you can use specialist software. There are a variety of different programmes out there designed to do this. The two I've used are MyModelHorse Database and OMHPS (this is a photoshowing database but can also be used for cataloguing if you have less than 2,000 models). I did also use one years ago that came on an actual disk (so vintage) but I cannot remember the name of it!

Once you have your models catalogued you can move on to data collection.

Step 2: Know what you've got

Now you need to know what you've got. There are various ways to do this but this is my super duper not technical simple method.

I use a blank excel spreadsheet. Along the bottom are tabs for different finishes. On each sheet is a column for the different show classes like so:

Underneath each one is a list of all the horses that go into that class. That way I can clearly see who I have for each class. I also use this to help pick horses for showing. You can also use filters on your actual catalogue to help with this.

As an aside the green squares are BMECS qualified horses for 23/24/25.

Step 3: Where are the gaps?

Now the next question is, where are the gaps. Above is an extract from my OF sheet. Not many gaps there. Now take a look at ARC:

Immediately you'll note that some columns aren't even there. I don't own a single ARC Paint Horse for example. You can also see some have WAY MORE horses than others. It is really no surprise that I own thousands of fantasy/decorators and then hardly any realistic models.

Seeing where I have gaps can help me to think about what I might want to focus on creating for the next year. This is especially useful if you have like 100 blank resins *maybe more cough*. So in terms of my painting for this year I am definitely going to increase my stock horses and I could also do with a few more British Native. I should probably not paint anymore fantasy or decorator models for a while!

Step 4: Where can you make cuts (if you want to)?

This step is totally optional. But if you do want to cut down your collection you could start by making cuts where you simply have too many horses to realistically ever show. Using this spreadsheet I can see that I have 156 OF Fantasy/Decorator horses. The reality is it would take years for me to show them all so most never go out. If I want to make cuts this is probably the best place to do it (I won't though, you can prise my decorators out of my cold dead hands).

Step 5: Where could you introduce new blood

The final step is to think about where new blood could be introduced. It may be that yes you have ten very nice CM Arabians, but actually they are all 10 years old and don't really do much anymore. Maybe, looking at that, a focus for this year could be adding some new ones. If you also cross reference with your workmanship tab you could focus down even more by trying to fill gaps in colour as well as breed.

So there we go! Collecting evaluated and stock take done. Now to start planning some shopping for the new year :D