Raz was founded by Nelson Pang and David Harding, in Toronto, in 2004. The company was literally started from scratch, with no designs or even concepts. We only knew that this category had been massively underappreciated and that we could do better.
Our first “office” was the board room of Motion Specialties. For more than a year, there was no revenue; all of the effort was directed towards designing and testing. Our first model, the Raz-AP, started shipping within the Canadian market in late 2005. The Raz-SP arrived in early 2006 and it wasn’t until 2007 that our most popular model, the Raz-AT, was produced.
In 2009 we moved into a 5000 sq. ft. industrial building a few blocks away from Motion. This was gradually expanded to 10,000 sq. ft., at which point no more additional space was available. In 2015, we acquired a 20,000 sq. ft. building, which underwent a ground-up renovation that took more than a year to complete.
In the new building we have the space to build what we needed to be a first-class operation and to manage the introduction of the many new models that are in the development stage.
