The lovely bods at Carr & Day & Martin got in touch to ask me if I would be willing to do a product review for them, well who wouldn’t?!
Carr & Day & Martin are one of those iconic horsey brands that I grew up with, and for me their orange and black packaging is instantly recognisable. I can remember sitting on the floor in my parent’s utility room going through the list of items I needed in my grooming kit for Pony Club Camp and carefully labelling all my brushes, and equipment, and yes I even got a permanent marker and labelled my bar of C&D&M solid saddle soap. I remember feeling especially pleased by the end of a week at camp when the translucent bar had developed a nice worn groove in it from all the cleaning my tack had received. (twice daily! I don’t think it’s ever been that clean since!).
Well things have moved on since solid soap and cardboard packaging and their spray-able products now come in big plastic containers with nifty prolonged spraying nozzles (don’t laugh at the word nozzles!). Basically you squeeze the handle once and it sprays for a couple of seconds all on its own, very funky stuff. See it in action in the videos below.
It’s a nice gimmick to have but also pretty useful for sneaking up the neck of horses that aren’t happy about the constant cranking noise of traditional dispensers. This way you can squeeze the bottle, start at the shoulder and move up the neck without having to pump the handle again, ideal for sensitive souls who are wimpy about spray bottles.
I trialled their Mane & Tail Conditioner and Dream Coat on Dustry, and having received them at the start of September they are still going strong. Dustry has a particularly naff excuse for a tail, big and bushy at the top and thin and straggly at the bottom, he’s a real looker!. I try to avoid brushing out his tail as much as possible because I think that any avoidable breakage from brushing will help him cling on to what little tail he has. I gave his tail a good go over with the Mane & Tail Conditioner and started to comb it out. The silky formula de-tangles really well, and with a little careful combing I managed to avoid breaking any hairs at all. The next day it was still very easy to brush through so for long lasting effect it also gets the thumbs up.
I think it’s a bit of a rite of passage for all horsey people at one time to liberally apply coat shine all over their horse whilst forgetting the need to plait up the next day. Cue trying to tame the slipperiest hair known to man into neat little buns! Thankfully the Mane & Tail conditioner doesn’t seem to do this. I sprayed both his tail and mane the day before dressage and plaited both up the following morning no problem, phew!
Same goes for the Dream Coat, I have also in my time liberally applied coat shine to a horse’s back and then wondered why the saddle had a life of its own! Dream Coat makes a lovely shine and silky feel to the coat without turning your horse into a greasy pole! In the summer when Dustry loves to roll in the dry mud no matter how much I body brush his rump it still has a dusty, dull look to the top of it, so I sprayed Dream Coat over it and body brushed a bit more and hey presto! Instant shine without all the elbow grease.
Now that the weather has turned and the clocks changed I will be battling mud from now till…well… March? so I’m going to use both products in a more preventative manner. Liberally applying them both at night when he is groomed off and stabled so that when he goes out in the day and plasters himself in filth, it comes off much easier thanks to his silky coat.
All in all I think these are pretty handy products to have on hand, so I’d give them an 8/10. They help to cut grooming time and effort considerably, which for me is always a bonus because less time spent grooming, means more time spent riding!
