Raidlight's Made in French Alps Workshop
Discover our workshop in the heart of the French Chartreuse mountains.
In 2014, RaidLight opened its textile confection workshop in Saint Pierre de Chartreuse, with lightweight, innovative products dedicated to trail runners. Covering an area of 500m², the workshop is made up of around 30 machines and other garment-making equipment and employed 10 people in 2019,in charge of creating, sewing and assembling over 30,000 products a year, from bags to shorts to belts.
"It's a deliberate and voluntary choice to produce part of it in France to offer customers the choice of buying Made In France." Benoit Laval, president and founder of RaidLight.
Why is our production not made entirely in France?
The answer is of course an issue of production cost and therefore, of selling price. Would it be logical to produce a waterproff, breathable jacket with a 500€ price tag? And what if our products had their price doubling, or more?
The products we make in France are designed with this cost constraint, which cannot be sustainable for all our collections. Our Made In France collection is composed ofhigh-end, minimalistic products in which we create a different value added. Therefore, this is not possible to decline this on all our products .
We are not "ashamed" to produce overseas either: in our globalized world, this participate to the positive evolution of developing countries. We regularly visit our plants abroad,and we carefully chose them depending on their output's quality, which directly derives from good working conditions.
