First, second, third… SOLD!

Success for Menhammar’s online auctions.

The pandemic forced Menhammar Stuteri to cancel their participation in the Elite Sales last year. Instead, they launched a WebTV broadcast auction – a success story that exceeded all expectations regarding both revenue and number of bidders. Now, in 2021, Menhammar has plans for three new online auctions.

Digital auctions have been around for years, but they have been static without interaction or two-way communication. Our mission was to create something as close to an exciting live auction experience as possible,” says Johan Hellander, Head of Menhammar Stuteri and a veterinarian.

Due to the pandemic Menhammar Stuteri had to reinvent the wheel when it was time for the first annual horse auction in May 2020. Gathering 1,000 people plus horses was out of the question. The only option left was to go digital.

Johan Hellander and his team decided to turn their annual event into a live WebTV broadcast auction, meaning all bids must be reported in real time. However, the team faced the challenge of eliminating the 10- to 30-second time delay between the customer bidding and the WebTV broadcast. In order to develop a groundbreaking bidding programme, with a maximum time delay of two seconds, Menhammar allied with TR Media, an innovative digital production company that is part of the Swedish Trotting Association.

The next challenge was to produce presentation material that, without bias, would present each horse. With the customers’ perspective in focus, movies and photos of the horses were produced, not only when trotting at high speed, but also striding peacefully and quietly.

We wanted to show the horses as close to ‘live’ as possible and used a green screen film of the horses enab­ling us to show them in any environment, turning our studio into a digital viewing arena, Johan explains.

A big advantage with online auctions is that potential buyers, both in Sweden and abroad, have the possibility to see the horse presentations days before the auction, and the online bidding started two days before the actual live bidding. Still, expectations were low when the auction opened.

We saw it as a semi-desperate attempt to maintain sales of our young horses. But it turned into the most successful auction for trotting horses ever held in Europe! We had 15,000 online bidders and reached not only new price levels, but also a new audience, says a pleased Johan Hellander.

However, the first auction on 5 July was stopped after the first horse was sold, due to technical problems. The site simply crashed due to the unexpected number of online bidders.

But the one horse we did sell before the site crashed was a cold-blooded horse whom we featured first with the purpose to get some attention – and he did. The colt was sold at SEK 875,000, more than three times as much as they normally go for.

The bugs were fixed and only one week later all 35 one-year olds born at Menhammar were sold during the WebTV broadcast auction. A record of five horses were sold for over SEK 1,000,000 – one of them for the all-time Menhammar high price of SEK 1.8 million.

The WebTV broadcast has changed the business for Menhammar. In the future, all auctions will be held online, making them available for more bidders as well as putting the safety, health and well-being of the horses first.

From an animal welfare point of view this is superior. It means that we can keep our horses at home and let them graze on summer meadows while we sell them, and then move them to their new homes peacefully and quietly. We won’t have to expose the horses, nor our co-workers, to risks associated with the pandemic.

The online auction service will now also be sold to an Italian breeder.

Menhammar horse auctions in 2021:

11 July: Selected one-year olds

12 September: One-year olds

21 November: Competing horses and mares in foal

Källa: Our Way 1-2021
Foto: Emine Lundsten