Jeff Minor enjoys making functional cowboy gear that is also beautiful. He started repairing tack at an early age — on ranches in Nebraska — and then began creating it.

“We repaired our own saddles, and our neighbors’ saddles,” he says. “I started doing braid work and every time I went to town I’d hang around the saddle shop, to learn more. I made my first 6-plait reins when I was 15. I used them awhile, then a guy wanted to buy them. So I sold those and made some more. That was the start of it all, realizing I could make something and sell it.”

In 1981, he apprenticed under a saddle maker in Colorado, where he’d gone to become a hunting guide. The outfitter he worked for had a lot of gear that needed repair, and sent Minor to the local saddle shop with it. They struck a deal in which the saddle maker taught him the craft in exchange for Minor doing tack repair.

He started working with rawhide in 1982, after he set up a saddle shop in Burns, Colo. After moving to Salmon, Idaho, in 1985, he set up a bigger workshop and started producing more saddles…