PADD opened in Wellington. Most American riders have never heard of it. That is worth understanding.
The store at 29 S H Street in Lake Worth Beach, Florida is minutes from the Palm Beach International Equestrian Center, the winter home of the most competitive equestrian circuit in the United States. It opened quietly, without a press release, without trade coverage, without any of the signals the US equestrian industry typically associates with a new retail entrant. It is not a tack shop that decided to expand. It is the US foothold of something that does not yet have an American equivalent.
The first PADD store opened in 1974 on rue de la Cavalerie in Paris's 15th arrondissement. Three founders. The name is an acronym of their first names: Pierre, Andre, and Denis. The address, rue de la Cavalerie, translates to Cavalry Street. A small Paris shop for horse people, on a street named for horses, that became France's dominant equestrian retailer over the next 50 years.
In 1994, the group acquired a saddlery near Dijon. In 1995, it opened its first large-format store, 360 square metres, at Coignieres in the Yvelines. The first franchised location opened in 2008 in Avignon. The current network spans 40 corporate stores and 54 franchised locations across France.
PADD is not an independent retailer. It is the retail arm of EKKIA Group, a company founded in 1967 in Haguenau, Alsace, that describes itself as Europe's leading brand platform for horse and rider equipment. Understanding what EKKIA actually does is the only way to understand what PADD's US entry actually means.
Most equestrian retailers do one thing: they buy brands from wholesalers and sell them to riders. The margin they capture is the spread between the price they pay and the price the rider pays. That is the entire business model, and it is the model Dover Saddlery, Greenhawk, and every independent tack shop in the United States operates on.
EKKIA Group operates differently. EKKIA designs its products in Alsace, uses subcontracted manufacturing, and distributes those products wholesale to 2,800 resellers in 70 countries. It also retails those same products through 100 PADD stores that carry 15,000 products from hundreds of brands, including but not limited to its own. The group serves approximately 500,000 customers annually.
PADD is not a brand store. It is a multi-brand specialist equestrian retailer. The distinction matters: a PADD store carries Samshield, Horseware, Kentucky, Uvex, and EKKIA's own labels alongside each other. EKKIA competes with those brands wholesale and sells them retail. That combination, owning the brands and owning the multi-brand retail network that sells them, does not exist in US equestrian.
EKKIA's publicly filed French accounts, submitted to the Registre du Commerce et des Societes, show revenue of 61,626,552 euros and net profit of 8,476,083 euros for the period ending 31 December 2024. That is a 13.7% net margin on a business that designs, wholesales, and retails across 70 countries. These are not estimates. They are filed accounts.
The clearest way to see how EKKIA's model actually works is through the Penelope brand.
In 2018, EKKIA signed a licensing agreement with Penelope Leprevost, the French Olympic equestrian champion, for the Penelope equestrian apparel brand she co-founded. EKKIA renewed that license in 2021 for 12 years. Under EKKIA's management, the brand grew from 25 products to 250.
Penelope sells through PADD stores. It also sells through 250 independent resellers in France and internationally. The brand has a wholesale life entirely separate from the PADD store network.
This is the structural distinction that separates EKKIA's approach from the house brand strategies at Dover Saddlery or Greenhawk. Dover's private label and Greenhawk's house brands exist to serve the store: they are margin tools for a retailer. EKKIA inverts the relationship. The brand exists in the wholesale market first. The store is one of many distribution channels, not the reason the brand exists.
The practical implication for the US is significant. EKKIA can seed brand demand through US wholesale accounts before a single additional PADD store opens. The retail follows the brand.
Pascal Gautherin has served as President of EKKIA since 2018. Before taking the group presidency, he ran the PADD store network directly. He understands the retail operation from the inside.
In a 2022 interview, he described EKKIA's position: "Apart from cycling, a shop specializing in a single sport like ours doesn't exist in France." The strategy he describes is cross-channel: wholesale relationships that create demand, retail locations that capture it, and e-commerce that extends reach beyond physical footprint.
In 2025, Gautherin opened EKKIA's capital to employees. Today, 100% of EKKIA's team members are shareholders. That is not a standard move for a company optimizing for a near-term exit. It is the kind of decision a builder makes.
EKKIA listed the opening of its US operation as one of its 2025 milestones. The US operation is paddtack.com, a platform with a US-based team managing the site and fulfilling orders from within the United States.
The physical retail piece is quieter. A store previously operating as Riderzon Equestrian at 29 S H Street, Lake Worth Beach, Florida now operates under the Paddtack brand. The phone number and address are unchanged. The Facebook page confirms the rebrand explicitly: "Riderzon.com becomes paddtack.com." The category listed is Boutique Store.
No press release. No trade coverage. No announcement.
Lake Worth Beach sits five to ten miles from the Palm Beach International Equestrian Center in Wellington, Florida. Between January and April, the Winter Equestrian Festival and the Global Dressage Festival draw the most competitive riders in the country to that geography. It is the most concentrated equestrian market in the United States during the winter season.
If you are introducing a brand to US equestrian consumers, there is no better room to be in. EKKIA chose the right room.
The e-commerce and physical retail combination also reflects the way EKKIA operates in France: wholesale and brand awareness first, retail presence to capture and amplify demand. Paddtack.com serves the national market. The Lake Worth Beach store serves the show circuit. The strategy is legible once you understand the model behind it.
EKKIA's position in France rests on 50 years of brand equity, an official partnership with the Federation Francaise d'Equitation, and deep relationships with riders at every level of the sport. None of that crosses the Atlantic automatically.
Penelope Leprevost is a three-time Olympic champion. She is largely unknown to American riders. The brand recognition that drives traffic to PADD stores in France does not exist here. It has to be built.
LeMieux has already staked the premium European import position in the US market, with audited revenues showing 51.7 million pounds in turnover for the year ended April 2024, and a 40% year-on-year increase in North America. The European brand category is not uncrowded.
Building from a single rebranded store in Lake Worth Beach to meaningful national presence is a long road. The wholesale seeding strategy only works if US tack shops and platforms pick up the line. EKKIA has the structural advantages to execute this. Structural advantages do not guarantee execution.
The US equestrian market has never had what PADD represents: a company that owns the brands and owns the multi-brand retail network that sells them. It has had retailers. It has had brands. It has had wholesalers. It has not had a single entity doing all three simultaneously, at scale, in a purpose-built specialist equestrian context.
That model exists in France. It has produced 100 stores, 2,800 wholesale resellers in 70 countries, 61.6 million euros in annual revenue, and a 13.7% net margin. It is now in Wellington.
Whether EKKIA can translate that infrastructure to the US market is genuinely unknown. The structural conditions that made PADD dominant in France, a single national federation, a concentrated equestrian culture, 50 years of brand building, do not exist here in the same form. The US is larger, more fragmented, and more competitive.
But the company that just arrived in Lake Worth Beach is not a retailer looking to open a few stores. It is an operator with a manufacturing-to-shelf model the US market has never encountered. Understanding what it is matters, because whether it succeeds or stumbles, it is going to change something about how equestrian retail works here.
A note on the numbers: EKKIA's revenue and profit figures are from publicly filed French accounts submitted to the Registre du Commerce et des Societes, accessed via verif.com, for the period ending 31 December 2024. Reseller count, store count, and employee shareholder information are from Pascal Gautherin's 2025 LinkedIn year-end recap. LeMieux revenue is from LDC's published portfolio page. The PADD franchise structure is from the lexpress-franchise.com listing. The Riderzon-to-Paddtack rebrand is sourced from the Paddtack Facebook page and the matching address and phone number confirmed via Yelp. Primary sources are linked inline throughout.