He runs, he runs Benoît Laval. Since the age of 10. A seasoned athletics and marathon runner, over the last few years he’s accumulated trail runs, orienteering treks, snowshoe racing... And when he runs he thinks. This is how he got the idea to design and manufacture differently.
The first Raidlight prototypes, he made and tested himself. They were immediately taken up and altered and then mass-manufactured.
The manufacturing universe was not an unknown quantity for this textile engineer who took his first steps in a company in Saint-Etienne, sub-contractor for a well-known brand of outdoor products. Since the creation of the Raidlight company in 1999, this innovative approach has continued.
Benoît Laval doesn’t just run to air his neurones, or to train, but also to put to the test, under race conditions, the products that his company will design and market.
The whole team participates in this practical and collective creation process. At the same speed as its founder.
For Benoît Laval “the core business of Raidlight is the passion for sport”. Its products correspond to needs and are validated by those who use them. A powerful driving force, because the turnover of the company at Saint-Genest-Malifaux progresses at a rate of 30% per year.
Over the years, Raidlight has learnt to walk in the footsteps of its customers. It has followed them in the Marathon des Sables, from trail runs to races worldwide, and then along the Way of Saint James, forever adapting its products to their needs.

Raidlight has the “willpower to be different from other brands”. Because we don’t have the same means and the same structures as our competitors, we have to do things differently if we want them to work”, stresses Benoît Laval. This doesn’t prevent him from using certain institutional levers. By integrating the competitive cluster Sporaltec in 2007, the company, perched at an altitude of 1000m in the Pilat region of France strengthened its policy for innovation with the support of Oséo and extracted itself from the pack of artisanal producers to inch its way into the industrial sector. With promising results.

Remarks collected by V. Charbonnier – Independent journalist

10 years of success
1999: founding of Raidlight
2001: first employee is recruited
2004: the company heightens its policy with retailers
2006: the first overseas retailers (Spain and United Kingdom)
2007: first research and development project with the competitive cluster Sporaltec.

The Charter for respect

“Raidlight is a company on a human scale.”
For us, respect is:
  Respecting the product: that it be useful for something.
  Respecting the customer: be transparent about the design and manufacture of the product and take into consideration the remarks made by the customers in order for the product to progress.
  Respecting our partners and our sub-contractors, even if they are on the other side of the world.
  Respecting the environment: we don’t want to give lessons or just commercialise, we endeavour to make improvements at all times, we want to be the forerunners in function of market conditions.
  Respecting our workforce: each year we distribute 20% of our profits, we hope to continue to recruit at the same rate as in previous years; we were three in 2004, seven in 2006, twelve in 2008.
Tomorrow we’ll be even more, customers, partners and employees, if we continue to respect each other.

Why the name of Raidlight?

“A brand name, it’s a blank piece of paper on which we scribble loads of names and doodles. We search to put a project of lightweight products for adventurers into images, and we wanted a brand name that could be read internationally. The most complicated part was finding an available name, because thousands are already registered with the INPI (National Industrial Property Institute)! The name RAIDLIGHT was available, it sounded right, it was an obvious choice. The logo that resembles a stylised compass completed the designation.”

 
 

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