She’S Not Horsing Around
One of her best friends nicknamed her Mare-tha Stewart, as much for Juli Thorson’s uncanny way with a paint-roller and eye for decor, as for her ability to take words and ideas and build them into equine-related empires.
“I’m driven by some internal force to try to improve everything I come in contact with,” Thorson says from her sprawling Troy ranch house where she lives with her husband, computer consultant, Edward Sala, and an ever-changing herd of dogs and horses.
“It doesn’t matter whether it’s an article, an entire magazine, a scruffy horse, or a living room with bad carpeting. To me, nothing exists that can’t be made better.”
Her life appears to have proved it. She has leapfrogged her way up the rungs of the equine journalistic world’s ladder by selling her services as an independent contractor. The 45-year-old has saved more than one struggling “nag-mag” as she calls the horse magazines she has bailed out and repackaged.
She just finished an eight-year stint as editor of what is now New York conglomerate Primedias “Horse & Rider.” She took over the magazine in an unprecedented merger of two widely dissimilar magazine titles.
“It was a marriage of different psychodynamics and demographics,” Thorson says. “In real estate terms it was a tear-down and start-from-scratch.”
The magazine’s readership now approaches 250,000.
In January, she signed on with the West’s equivalent of the coffee table staple, Western Horseman. The Colorado-based magazine bills itself as the world’s leading horse magazine since 1936, a title Thorson says is accurate.
One of the aspects of the moving-to-another-magazine deal was that she would bring her editor’s column. Unlike most editor’s columns, which are known for their dryness or perfunctory duty introducing the magazine’s contents, Thorson’s column over the years has been a diary of sorts. It has chronicled her life events and thoughts creating barns-full of avid horsey readers who eagerly await each issue and read her column as if it’s a personal letter to them.
As Western Horseman’s book editor, she’ll be in charge of putting together a volume by one of the horse world’s superstars, 30-time world champion Bob Avila of Oregon. She has also edited his magazine, Ride with Bob Avila.
On the side, Thorson buys young horses to resell after she has put on the retail shine. Her most recent sale sent what could be a future world champion to a new owner in Milan, Italy.
“Fix-up ideas are my stock in trade. I generate more of them per day than could possibly be enacted,” Thorson said with a smile in a living room that looks like it was decorated by the Wild West’s version of Martha Stewart. Antique bridles hang in cozy vignettes next to FiestaWare pottery and elegantly funky antiques.
Thorson starts her day in front of her home office computer at 6:30 each morning. Coffee as thick as the mud in her horses’ paddocks fuels her as she wades her way through dozens of daily e-mails and faxes from readers and fans. Then she begins to create.
“I’m fearless when it comes to enacting change,” Thorson says. “If nothing changes, nothing changes.”
In the afternoon, when cognitive abilities start to go mushy, she’ll recharge creative juices by pulling out a paint roller and transforming a room with rich terra cotta walls into vibrating aqua. She’ll huff and puff moving furniture around (she admits she moves nearly all of the furniture in her house at least once a month), putter in her elaborate Stewart-like gardens, or plan her next dinner party, which is as carefully orchestrated as one might expect of a magazine editor nicknamed Maretha.
The boss-hoss of the horse world niche is happy with her life. Many in her industry say she just as easily could have climbed different corporate ladders and wound up in Forbes rather than on the masthead of horse magazines.
She now owns the same ranch where she worked as a hired groom some 25 years ago, a dream purchase she made scouting the Palouse on a foray from her former Portland home four years ago.
“You couldn’t pay me enough to go to work every day in a suit and pantyhose, or to play bottom-line politics around a corporate conference table,” Thorson says. “I make my living by relating to other people who have horses, and to do that well, I need the freedom to go out every day and get dirty with my own. My best creation, so far, is a life that lets me do that.”