Three years ago, I was standing at the paddock gate at 6am, coffee in one hand, a bottle of the "best" fly spray on the market in the other, spraying my horse before I'd even said good morning to him.

By 5pm, he had a fresh welt on his belly. Wire-brush raw. Like something had been dragged across it.

I did what every horse owner does. I bought a different spray. Then another one. Then the one my Facebook group swore by. Then the homemade citronella recipe. Then the expensive one that smelled so bad I could taste it in the back of my throat for an hour after applying it.

None of them lasted more than a couple of hours. Some didn't last one.

I started keeping the bottles. Not on purpose — I just couldn't bring myself to throw them out, because throwing them out felt like admitting I'd failed again. My tack room shelf became a graveyard. Nine, ten bottles deep, all at various stages of "maybe this was the problem, maybe I just didn't apply enough."

The worst night was the one where I found a new welt after a 6am spray I'd watched myself do properly. I sat on the edge of my bed, still in my barn clothes, and I cried. Not the dramatic kind. Just quiet leaking, the kind you do when you're too tired to even be upset properly.

I remember thinking: maybe I'm not cut out for this. Maybe somebody else could keep him safer than I can.

That thought is the reason this company exists. Because a few weeks later, at close to midnight, I went down a research rabbit hole instead of going to sleep, and I found out something that changed everything.

I talked to a horse vet, and later an entomologist confirmed it on record: the same fly spray formula that used to last three days in the 1980s now lasts two to three hours — because flies have evolved resistance to it, the same way bacteria evolve resistance to antibiotics. I wasn't doing anything wrong. I was using a tool that had quietly stopped working years ago, while the label never changed.

That's when I learned the actual mechanism — that biting insects don't find your horse by luck, they track him, following a scent plume of CO2, lactic acid, and skin compounds drifting on the wind. Conventional spray tries to kill the insect once it's already landed. But by then, it's already bitten him once, and pyrethroid resistance means it barely slows the next one down.

Certain aromatic plant oils do something different — they interfere with the insect's ability to find him in the first place, scrambling the scent signal instead of waiting for contact. It's not folk wisdom. It's documented, peer-reviewed, and it's why it doesn't fail the same way.

I built Mare & Clare because I needed this to exist and it didn't — not with fast US shipping, not without the price tag of a used saddle, not made by someone who actually understood what it feels like to fail at protecting an animal you love, every single day, for six months a year.

If you're standing at your own gate right now, tack room shelf full of things that didn't work, I'm not going to tell you this is magic. I'm going to tell you why the other stuff stopped working, and what we do instead. You've earned that explanation. You've paid for it, over and over, in bottles that let you both down.

This one's different. Not because I say so — because of why.