The story of RAULI is like something out of a great adventure book, and looking back now, I have to admit it has had its share of drama.
It all started in the early days of Aurinkotekniikka. We were up on a Finnish tile roof, trying to install solar panels. It was dark, cold, and wet. A mix of rain and snow was coming down, and the temperature was just above freezing. Everything was slippery, our hands were freezing, and the whole job was taking way too long.
The problem was simple. The mounting system we were using was terrible. It was clearly not designed for the rough, wet conditions we have up here in the North. Back then, we had to use brackets imported from Europe or Asia, and they just did not work for us.
My business partner at the time, Rauli, finally had enough. He looked at the mess we were dealing with on that freezing roof and said, "This cannot be this hard." We were losing a full workday on every tile roof because of these poorly designed brackets.
That weekend, Rauli disappeared into his workshop. He sketched out a new design for a better bracket, took it to a local machine shop, and had the first prototypes made. That was the birth of the first RAULI brackets, although they would not get their name until years later.
At first, we kept the brackets for ourselves. Rauli developed versions for metal and seam roofs, and soon we were doing all our installations with our own products. The brackets worked so well that word started to spread. Before long, our competitors started calling, asking if they could buy the brackets from us.
At first, we said no to everyone. These brackets were our thing, our competitive edge. But the calls kept coming. Then, the distributors started calling. They promised to sell our brackets to dozens, maybe even hundreds, of our competitors. In 2019, we finally decided to give it a shot. We named the brackets RAULI and started selling them to others.
The next year, we took an even bigger risk. We knew we had a great product, and even though the coronavirus pandemic made things tough, we decided to take RAULI international.
It was not easy. We made cold calls, sent messages on social media, and connected with potential partners on LinkedIn. We even wrote articles about RAULI brackets for Hungarian solar energy websites, in Hungarian, a language none of us spoke.
One thing led to another, and before long, we had a group of businesspeople from Hungary visiting the factory in Orimattila. They liked what they saw, and soon after, we signed a distribution deal covering seven countries. It kept us going.
We kept grinding, kept looking for new distributors, and slowly built our network across Europe. It was a crazy, exhausting time, but it paid off. Today, RAULI is a well-known name in the European solar market.
International growth required significant investments in digitalization, and we began developing our own design app in 2022. Two years later, a study commissioned from Norwegian Solarconsulting found that the RAULI APP was ahead of its competitors in both usability and the clarity of its reports. After this study, we took the app to the next level, adding AI and machine learning features for electrical component calculations and bringing project reporting to a completely new level.
The biggest difference between RAULI and its competitors is the product's innovative features. It is a 100% Nordic product. The high-strength steel used in the brackets comes from SSAB, and all manufacturing takes place in Orimattila, Finland. The carbon footprint of each product is carefully documented, and we can provide accurate CO2 emission data for each project. RAULI is built to withstand the harsh conditions of the North, where solar panels must handle snow loads of hundreds of kilos during the winter months. The product's supply chain is short and carefully documented, which allows us to offer a warranty of up to 30 years.