1892

John H. Best founded a company in Galva, Illinois to serve the horse-and-carriage trade. His product was a steel rack for displaying buggy whips and carriage rugs. His philosophy was that goods well displayed are half sold — a line the company trademarked in 1949 and still runs on today.

The buggy trade went away. The company didn't.

Over the next century those same steel racks became display systems for floor coverings, carpet and rug displays, casket showrooms, and today large OEM fabrication. What never changed was the actual skill: cutting, bending, welding and finishing steel into something that holds weight and looks right doing it. JH Best has been doing that in the same Illinois town for more than 130 years, out of a 67,500-square-foot shop.

Best Barn Solutions is built there. Same shop, same steel, same name.

Which is why our racks don't bow

Most tack storage on the market is wire — light to ship, cheap to make, and it starts sagging the first time you hang a show saddle on it. We build out of high-strength steel because that's the material this shop has worked in since the Harrison administration.

It also means we can move fast. When we decide a saddle bar needs a heavier gauge, we don't file a change request with a factory eight thousand miles away and wait four months for a sample. We walk out onto the floor and make the change that afternoon. Every Best Barn Solutions product was prototyped, bent, welded and tested in the same building it ships from.

The horses came back through Teri

I'm Jill Pankau. My mother-in-law, Teri Pankau, has had horses and ponies since she was a girl. She went on to show and breed quarter horses under Pankau Quarter Horses, and she's still at it today.

Best Barn Solutions was her idea. She was the one who looked at a company that had been building steel racks for over a century and asked the obvious question: why aren't we building the ones our own tack room needs?

She's also the reason I ride. I came to horses through Teri, and we both show western pleasure — which means the tack room this stuff was designed for is a real one, and I've stood in it at 5 a.m. before a show trying to locate my show saddle and not cause a landslide of other saddles to come crashing down. 

What that means for your barn

Everything we sell has been hung in a real tack room, loaded into a real trailer, and hauled to a real show before it ever went on the site. We know what a show saddle weighs. We know what an aisle looks like when four people are tacking up at once. And we know a rack has to hold in July heat and January cold in an unheated building, because that's where ours live.

A hundred and thirty years of steel. A family that shows quarter horses. The same idea John H. Best had in 1892 about horse people needing a decent rack.

- Jill Pankau
Best Barn Solutions · Galva, Illinois

SHOP THE RACKS