As someone who has been around Rack-A-Tiers in one way or the other since I was about 6 years old, I think I’m uniquely qualified to talk about the company. See photo evidence above of me in a Canadian Tuxedo on the Racks and rocking a sweet vintage Bulls shirt with the original wooden Rack-A-Tiers prototypes.
Rack-A-Tiers is still a family run business started by my Dad, Ken, an electrician obsessed with making cool tools for electricians. I could never imagine how far we’ve come when I was the first janitor of the original Rack-A-Tiers office above my Dad’s garage. We can’t thank our fans enough for continuing to buy and use our products and prop us up through the years of making great tools and some pretty weird ones as well.
For this Father’s Day, let’s look at some of Ken’s other children (his tools) that were the foundation of the company and have been a consistent part of our catalogue since almost the beginning.
The original Bend-All was one of our first products added to the catalogue outside the Rack-A-Tiers dispenser. I wish I had some pictures of myself and my neighbour friend working the assembly line to package these in our garage. Now with an upgraded Sr. version, this tool truly has stood the test of time.
Another tool that was key in our growth as a company. The hardest thing to do as a tool manufacturer is to make something that an electrician will add to his everyday tool pouch. They are very picky when it comes to this category. The Croc’s got our foot in the door with own twist on the wire strippers electricians use every day. With hundreds of thousands of units sold and still going strong, the Croc’s were accepted by the industry and continue to find the tool belts of electricians across North America.
The Exploding Garbage Can has been with us since almost the beginning. It was spotted at a trade show for homeowners to use for gardening, camping etc. Ken saw the value in something that was compact enough for any work truck but expandable, portable and perfect for the job site. Electricians get a bad rap for not cleaning up after themselves. We’re helping break that stereotype one garbage load at a time.
One of Ken’s first big investments into developing a product outside of the Rack-A-Tiers dispensers. He met with an inventor out of the New England area – who is no longer with us unfortunately – to check out his conduit bender innovation that was going to change the industry. Ken has poured his heart into this product, and it hasn’t quite reached the potential we know it has. We’ve had molds break, factories go broke and everything in between happen to this tool. It’s a great product and once you get it in your hands and start using it, you realize how much more efficient it can make the task.
Believe it or not but back in the day barely any of the driver bits for sale were colour-coded. If they were, it was the smallest strip that was hard to see or wore off quickly. We figured why not have the whole thing painted. We partnered with the original Robertson brand fasteners for the square drive and sourced the other common driver bits in the industry and painted them all over. This breakthrough of a commodity product that is continually used and bought repeatedly allowed Rack-A-Tiers to gain some capital and invest that back into more inventor ideas and continue to come out with innovative products that maybe other companies would not have bothered with.
My Dad loves tools and loves to see an inventor’s idea make it to the shelf. He’ll take a chance on the weird one where everyone else would have hung up the phone. He’s been a big part in pushing innovation within the industry for over 30 years. I like to think that he’s had an influence on these other big companies to continue to up their games when it comes to making an electrician’s job safer and more efficient.
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