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About The Rodeo Shop
How We Started
Don and Joan Lutz built The Rodeo Shop. They did not come into it with money or polish. When Joan was honored as Preble County’s Woman of the Year, she described herself as “a child of the Depression, with a 10th grade education and the love of an animal, the horse.” They met on the show and rodeo circuit, got married on horseback, worked weekdays, trained horses at night, and competed on weekends.
The store started the same way their life did: with whatever work paid. Don was a milkman for Royal Crest Dairy. Joan picked up garbage at area restaurants. In 1959 they bought a small building and opened a tack and western wear shop. Joan said the building cost $400, then she spent $55 on fixtures and $30 on freight. “Now I was down to $315 to start the inventory,” she said, “but we had a lot of signs on the windows.” Their first year’s sales were $1,555.35, and she always added the punchline: “Today, I would go out of business.”
No Guesswork
Joan had a rule for life and business that still fits The Rodeo Shop: “You’re born and you die and what you do in between is up to you.” Around here that meant you work, you learn, and you keep moving. A magazine profile caught her management style in one line: “What we have here is a team effort, and you can’t have a team when half of them are in the dark.” She kept the books open, built incentives, and expected everyone to understand the health of the place—and carry their share of it.
That “keep moving” part was not poster talk. It was how decisions got made. Joan tested ideas instead of arguing about them forever. “I feel that if I try 20 things and 15 of them go sour, I still have five that did something,” she said. If there was an opening, she took it, fixed what broke, and kept what worked. That attitude didn’t just run the store—it kept the whole operation growing.
Built for Real Use
Over the years, The Rodeo Shop became a hub with spokes because that’s how horse life really works. You don’t just “shop.” You ride, you learn, you haul, you get thrown a new problem, and you need a place where the answers aren’t theoretical. So the place grew around the people it served. There were indoor and outdoor arenas. There were riding lessons, clinics, roping instruction, and events that brought folks together—so the knowledge didn’t stay locked up in somebody’s head, and beginners had somewhere to start without getting talked down to.
And a lot of what people need isn’t a product—it’s a decision. What size, what fit, what hardware, what’s going to fail, what’s going to rub, what’s going to get you in trouble at a show or on the road. That’s why we’re not a costume store. We’re a working store: we’ll tell you when something’s wrong for your job, even if it costs us a sale, because you’re the one stuck with it when it breaks.
Real Experience Behind the Counter
Joan wasn’t an onlooker selling a fantasy. She was a competitor and a teacher, and the credibility behind the counter came from doing the work. Newspaper coverage in the 1960s named her the 1963 Ohio Girls Barrel Racing Association champion. Later, at 43, she went back on the road and qualified for a major rodeo finals in Tulsa—one story called it “more true grit per pound than John Wayne,” including competing while injured. That’s the kind of background that makes advice plain and practical.
She also pushed beyond Preble County when it came to the business itself. The industry remembered her as “a dedicated advocate for the independent retailer,” a founding member of the Western and English Retailers Association, and a decades-long market attendee. In 1982 she became the first woman to conduct a retailer seminar at the Denver market. She did not mince words with manufacturers—if something was unfair, she went to fix it. She wanted a level playing field, because customers shouldn’t pay for manufacturer games.
“I’ve never seen a good horse with a bad bone or breed, same goes for people.”
Under the toughness, Joan was loyal and fair in a way you don’t see much anymore. Her credo was, “I’ve never seen a good horse with a bad bone or breed, same goes for people.” Folks in the industry said, “With Joan, you had to work at being disagreeable.” She could be blunt, but it was the bluntness of someone who cared about doing things right—honest answers, fair dealing, and customer service treated like the foundation, not a slogan.
If The Rodeo Shop has a heart, it has always been the people behind the counter. Joan never acted like she did it alone; she said her strength was “surrounding myself with people who are strong in all of my weak areas.” One of the most important was Kathy Hicks, the longtime manager who kept the place running. Joan put it plainly: “She is our Kathy at The Rodeo Shop, most people don’t even know her last name.” And she didn’t dress it up after that: “Don and I owe more than we can ever repay to Kathy. If you took Kathy out of my life, I wouldn’t be standing here tonight.”
Straight Dealing
When Joan passed away in 2002, Kathy Hicks carried the place forward. She ran The Rodeo Shop for the next fifteen years—steady, competent, and determined—until her death in 2017. Don also passed away in 2017. The point is simple: the work didn’t stop when it got hard. People showed up, took responsibility, and kept the doors open.
A big reason the store still feels like “the place” is the people who stayed and made a career here. Joan valued stability and people who could be counted on—“Some of us at The Rodeo Shop have worked together many years. We have very little turnover…” That didn’t happen by accident: clear expectations, shared responsibility, fair treatment. And then there were the countless part-time hands over the years, especially young women working after school, weekends, and summers—learning product, solving problems, and keeping their head when the counter is busy and the phone won’t quit. Joan respected doers, and this place has always been glad to be a stepping stone.
The Shop Today
Today, The Rodeo Shop is still family-run into the third generation, still sitting on Route 40, still built around horses and the people who live that life. We carry western wear and working gear—boots, jeans, hats, tack, and the practical stuff that keeps you moving when something breaks or doesn’t fit right. The world changes, the brands change, the trends come and go, but our standard hasn’t: be fair, be straight, and sell what holds up.
People walk in brand new and need somebody to explain it without talking down to them. People walk in who’ve been coming here for decades and just want the right thing, fast. Either way, you should leave with what you need and the sense you were treated right. If you want authentic western wear, good gear, straight answers, and a place that’s been doing this since Eisenhower was in office, you’ve found it.