At the start of the school year, our business teacher set us a task of forming groups and brainstorming ideas for a business with the aim of reaching the Meath County Student Enterprise competition in Trim. After putting together a group of Mary Freeman, Ava Cadden, Kate O’Reilly and Emily Finegan we started thinking of everyday problems that people involved in the equestrian industry face and tri
ed to create products that would remotely help or solve these issues. One issue that we came across was the trouble that young or beginner riders have with positioning their feet correctly when riding. It is important to position your feet correctly because it increases your balance, thus reducing the risk of falling and obtaining serious injuries. We decided on designing and producing a stirrup thread that would guide your foot into the correct position while riding. We then called our company AMOR and our product ‘The Stirrup Guide’. AMOR has come a long way to becoming what we are today. We spent days, nights and months designing, redesigning and improving our business, but all of that is worth it when we see what it has resulted in today. We look at the product that we have made with proud eyes and only think of the opportunities that it has brought to us and those still to come. At the start we created a rough prototype of our product to give us an idea of the size and an overall view of it. Then we worked on it until we were satisfied enough to get a real working product made. We gave our design to a local engineering company called Hand Engineering to make our product. They happily agreed and made our first pair of AMOR stirrup guides free of charge. We have since tested our product ourselves and got in touch with local riding schools to test out our product which resulted in multiple purchases. We then went to the Meath Student Enterprise Final and won 1st prize in the Junior Category. Through feedback and investigation we then slightly modified the design of our product and arrived to where we are today. We are going to the All Ireland Student Enterprise Final and we have our goal set to winning it.
