A letter from the Founder:
Ra forges street design with tech. Whether you’re the poster-worthy, bare-chest-signing pro, or you’re breaking personal goals, Ra’s gonna help you reach the top of your game and then some.
Be sure to sign up for the Ra Gods membership program, loaded with ridiculous perks, including:
- ★ Exclusive access to limited edition eyewear not available anywhere else
- ★ Try before you buy anything in our growing eyewear lines for absolutely free, including free shipping both ways
- ★ Access to ultra-exclusive events and stuff as you increase your rank as a Ra God
- ★ Models and company founders taking your customer service calls
Ra’s latest designs are sold exclusively online. Visit our site’s store on your computer or phone to get yourself new goggles and (very soon) a few pairs of shades. Or check out the store on Facebook, where you can place orders without being redirected.
The bottom line is that Ra knows how to make killer eyewear and takes your happiness personally.
On Ra’s Beginnings:
Rob Shanks and I co-founded Ra Optics in 2009. We’ve been friends since childhood, and participated in a lot of the same activities, including hitting up Mt. Hood on our days off. Ra Optics started as a part time project to our day jobs- he in finance and I in real estate development- to just build quality snow goggles we wanted to use. We wanted goggles ourselves that just worked. We didn’t understand why existing optics companies had to make it so difficult to get the features needed for one pair of goggles to do everything we needed them to in order to have a good experience on the mountain, nor did we have the patience to wait for a legacy optics company to get around to creating one. Nothing ruins a day on the mountain more than bad goggles.
We spent the summer of 2009 diving into materials testing and iterating our prototypes almost daily. We were hacking together new goggles, essentially. Manufacturing and hard good product development was new territory to us. We burned through the learning curve in a matter of months. Even though both Rob and I are well educated, have business experience, and are pretty logical thinkers, we approached Ra more as artists. We thoroughly enjoyed studying every intricate detail about how optics worked in mountain conditions, and constantly built up and tore down our own designs and models until we were satisfied enough with a completed product.
Once we had the first workable prototype hacked together, we sought out engineers and manufacturers that could contribute commercial-grade parts to our specifications. We ended up sourcing from suppliers across five different counties, because we were so particular about the optical technology we needed for the goggles- we were building for ourselves, after all. We ended up completing the production runs for the Ra Performance Line, our first line of goggles and our first product at all, and wagered there were enough people across the country equally as fed up with the quality of goggles on the market as we were, so we offered these goggles that we built for our own use for sale. We then expanded into more goggle lines and other eyewear products.
We continue to iterate our goggles and eyewear products, and still do much of our product development through materials testing and trial & error up on the mountain. We don’t have outside investors or large loans limiting the company to financial decisions alone. We set out to be the best, not the biggest. Everything we build has to be done with purpose, and Ra Optics is proof a small team can design and produce world-class cutting edge eyewear with great quality- and out perform large competitors- through passion and ingenuity.
Sincerely,
Adam
