CWD is the Nontron saddlery the LIM group grew out of — and it sells six-thousand-dollar bespoke saddles under codes like SE26 rather than names.

CWD follows Devoucoux as the round’s second brand of the same company, and it is the inverse of its stablemate in every way that matters to a designer. Where Devoucoux names its saddles after Basque places, CWD numbers its. Where Devoucoux was acquired, CWD is the business the group grew out of. Its answer to a round about who owns and where-makes the saddle is a naming system stripped back to an index: the saddle sold by its code.

Its identity is the saddle sold by its code. The Nontron workshop, the composite tree and a contested founding year are the story here. The jumping saddle. The saddle sold by its code.

(Honest notes, so the founding, the ownership, the product and the making are framed accurately. On founding, a genuine conflict worth publishing rather than smoothing: CWD’s own history page says it was created in 1998, and the Nontron company behind it was indeed registered in October 1998 — but the group’s own investor announcement of 2016 says the CWD brand was born in 2000, out of the takeover of the Nontron saddlery. Both are first-party statements and they disagree, so we give both. Laurent Duray is widely reported as the founder, though CWD’s own history page names no founder, so we attribute it. What the initials stand for is not stated anywhere we could find, and we do not guess. On ownership: CWD is a brand of the group’s operating company at Nontron, with the group led by its founder and management alongside minority institutional investors — one since 2016, another announced in December 2025. The important structural point is that CWD is the elder sibling commercially: the group grew out of this business and later bought Devoucoux, not the other way round, and a common description of the group as a merger of the two gets the direction wrong. On the making: saddles are made at the group’s original workshop at Nontron in the Dordogne, where the composite tree is machined. We do not claim a wholly French supply chain, because the group also owns a Portuguese tannery and an English saddlery and publishes no breakdown. Its marks are IP we describe but do not reproduce; there is no official brand hex.)

CWD lives in a CWD olive. Click a swatch to copy the hex.

CWD’s identity is French, group-owned and sport-led — a CWD olive, an ink, a pale olive, a deep moss, and a paper. The palette leans CWD olive and deep moss: a yard register that stands in for a performance saddlery rather than a loud logo colour. It signals the saddle sold by its code — French, group-owned and sport-led. The honest caveat: with no official brand hex, these values are an unofficial interpretation, not first-party colours.

The lesson is a code can be a positioning device. Set CWD beside Devoucoux — same company, same factory town in the paperwork, opposite naming philosophies — and the choice becomes legible. Devoucoux’s Basque words sell romance and place. CWD’s codes sell measurement. A saddle called SE26 makes an implicit promise that the number means something: that there is a system behind it, that the difference between one model and the next is specifiable rather than poetic. For a brand whose pitch is sporting performance and whose core technology is an invisible composite tree, that is coherent — the nomenclature matches the claim. It is also commercially brave, because a code is harder to love than a name, and the brand leans on its ranges to carry the warmth. Two brands, one owner, two answers to the same question: that is the most useful thing in this round for anyone building a product family. Because a strong hue can fail as small text, keep type dark and let the colour live in the accents, palette and band. The takeaways: give both founding years; attribute the founder; never guess the initials; and read the codes as positioning.

The register is a code sans — French, group-owned, sport-led.

CWD’s identity carries a French, sporting spirit — a saddlery that talks in performance rather than provenance. A code sans captures the mood: neutral, systematic and modern, the register of a brand whose products are identified by index. Set in a CWD-olive palette, the code sans feels specified rather than storied — exactly the personality CWD carries. It behaves like a machined, laminated thing rather than a loud logo, mirroring a tree arc and a panel line. (CWD’s real products, its tree technologies, its hot-stamped flap mark and the name itself are things we describe but do not reproduce, and the exact typeface is not ours to use.) Because it is not ours to use, the honest description is “a code-sans brand,” shown here in a stand-in. The type behaves like the brand: French, group-owned and sport-led.

CWD stands for the saddle sold by its code.

CWD holds the round’s code node. A CWD-olive palette, a code sans and a Nontron workshop make one thing — the saddle sold by its code — the whole identity: French, group-owned and sport-led. The workshop is the frame, the composite tree is the substance, and the model codes are the signature. The point is the business a whole French equestrian group grew out of, still selling its saddles as specifications rather than stories.

Put to work, the identity is the conflict published and the direction corrected. A brand in this spirit would give both founding accounts — the brand’s own 1998 and the group’s own 2000 — attribute the founder rather than asserting him, decline to expand the initials, state that CWD is the group’s founding business and Devoucoux the acquisition, place manufacture at Nontron in the Dordogne, and stop short of a wholly-French supply-chain claim. A reader in this spirit would keep the facts right: CWD makes jumping and hunter saddles; it dates to 1998 or 2000 depending on which of its own sources you read; it is a brand of a French group; and it is made at Nontron. CWD follows Devoucoux, before Antarès. The honest editorial moves are to publish the conflict, to attribute the founder, to correct the direction of the deal, and to leave the initials alone.

For designers and brand-builders, CWD holds the code node: a nomenclature is an argument about what kind of product you are selling. The lessons: a category can hold two opposite naming philosophies inside one company, here Basque place-names at Devoucoux and alphanumeric codes at CWD, and the contrast is the clearest lesson in the round; a founding is given as a genuine conflict between two first-party sources rather than resolved silently; an ownership is described as a brand of the group’s operating company with the founder and management alongside minority institutional investors, and the direction of the 2013 deal is corrected, because the group grew out of CWD and bought Devoucoux rather than being a merger of equals; a product family is described by its systems, a carbon-and-Kevlar composite tree machined at Nontron in one range and a wooden-frame tree with a polypropylene seat and composite bars in the other; and a line designed explicitly around women’s morphology is noted as a real piece of product thinking rather than a marketing gesture. Three disciplines apply. An undated claim about what share of the world’s top riders use the brand is the riskiest sentence available and is attributed or cut. A connected saddle the brand launched with considerable fanfare no longer appears anywhere on its site and its dedicated subdomains no longer respond, so that is reported as an observation about the current site and never as a discontinuation with an invented date. And the third-party scanning tools that surface alongside saddle-fitting searches are not this brand’s, so no fitting technology is attributed to it. The hook is that restraint: CWD is the saddle sold by its code, the Nontron house that indexes what its stablemate romanticises. Read that way, CWD is less a single saddle than the saddle sold by its code: French, group-owned, sport-led. The lesson for a brand is that how you name a product tells a buyer what kind of promise you think you are making. CWD made the-saddle-sold-by-its-code the identity — proof that a code can carry a category.

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