Established practices in any field can almost always be traced back to small, innovative enterprises that took on a big job and executed it well. Werk Thoroughbred consultants, based in Fremont, California, a quiet, East Bay suburb of silicon valley, certainly fits that profile.

Jack Werk, who passed away early this year, founded the company in the late 1980s, initially running the operation in an office he rented in the rear of a Fremont hairdresser’s salon. The company quickly outgrew that modest beginning, however, and it did so by breaking the mould that had been cast for thoroughbred pedigree consulting services.

Rather than seeking patronage for his services among the major commercial operations, Werk tailored his consulting to the small breeding operation and to new entrants to the game. Werk’s offer of an independent perspective caught on among clients wary of established practices of the time, and, with the introduction of the Werk Nick Rating, which provided an objective measure of the effectiveness of sire-line crosses, the business really took off.

The transformation of Werk’s approach from innovation to established practice is no more clearly evident than in the success and popularity of the company’s online nick rating service, eNicks.com, exclusively featuring the Werk Nick Rating. Developed and implemented in 2003, the service became a virtual overnight success, appealing to breeders and buyers looking for an edge in planning their matings and purchases and to stallion operations eager to increase the visibility of their stallions on a cost-effective basis.
The key to the immediate popularity of the service was its offer to subscribe sponsoring stallions at an annual fee paid by the stallion farm so that users of the service could retrieve nick ratings for their mares free of charge when matched with sponsoring stallions. Currently, the service subscribes in excess of 700 sponsoring stallions.

The eNicks.com service is also catching on in the Southern Hemisphere, with more than 130 sponsoring stallions standing in Australia or New Zealand. Sid Fernando, Werk’s hand-picked successor as President of WTC, credits the company’s strategic partnership with the website stallions.com.au, which hosts a link to the eNicks facility. “They’ve done a great job promoting stallion sponsorships,” said Fernando. “Of course, that’s made possible, too, by the overwhelming enthusiasm of breeders and buyers who are using the service to plan their matings and purchases,” he added.

The popular website stallions.com.au features a widget linking users of its website directly to WTC’s exclusive MareMatch service. According to WTC senior pedigree analyst Elaine Belval, “The MareMatch facility enables breeders to enter a mare and get a list of Australasian stallions ranked in order of their nick ratings with that mare. That feature is enormously popular with breeders because it takes a lot of the guesswork out of the process.”

Despite its success and its hard-won status as a mainstream operation, the company continues its push for innovation. Following its successful implementation of the MareMatch facility in 2008, the company added a new level to the letter-grade format of the Werk Nick Rating. According to Belval, “We introduced the A+++, or Triple Plus as we call it, to reflect crosses that are substantially represented by graded/group one and two winners. That’s to distinguish crosses that might be equalled by other crosses in frequency of stakes winners, but that differ in the sense that they tend to produce runners of very high class.”

One notable representative of that new nick rating is Golden Slipper S. (G1) winner Crystal Lily (Stratum-Crystal Snip, by Snippets). When the name of her dam, Crystal Snip, is entered in the MareMatch widget at stallions.com.au, the list of Australian sponsoring stallions appears in nick rating order with their farm and stud fee. Users can narrow the list by selecting stud fee parameters, and the list can be sorted alphabetically, by province, or by farm.

Each entry in the list also has a “Retrieve eNick” button. Clicking the button associated with STRATUM, the sire of Crystal Lily, brings up her five-cross pedigree, prominently displaying the “A+++” nick rating. That page also has a “View SWs for this cross” button which, when clicked, opens a window listing the current stakes winners bred from the cross, including Crystal Lily and Oakleigh Plate (G1) winner Snitzel (Redoute’s Choice-Snippets’ Lass, by Snippets).

That’s not all. Each stakes winner bred from the cross is listed with buttons linking to a list of its stakes wins and to its five-cross pedigree. All of these features are essential to the effective use of nick ratings, according to pedigree analyst Roger Lyons, who assists WTC in the development of its products and services.
“A sire-line nick rating can take you in the right direction,” he says, “but you still have to narrow the choice down to one stallion representing one of those sire lines, and that means looking for similarity between your mare and those that have had the best results by a given stallion.”

Over the years, WTC has excelled by providing the pedigree tools that are right for the job at hand and by keeping faith with its reputation as an innovative and fiercely independent resource for pedigree information and consulting. Judging from its success, that has been a winning approach.

Enter Mare:

Permalink| Aug 4, 2010

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