25 years RAHN USA Corporation

March 1998
RAHN arrived planting the Swiss Flag in our distribution partners' Aurora IL facility where we occupied a small corner of their 32,000sq foot warehouse.

E-mail was in its infancy (fax was mostly used for written communication) and the search engine of choice was ALTA VISTA - now part of Yahoo. GOOGLE also launched in 1998.

April 1998
The first order was processed on April 1^st, 1998. April 1^st is famous for practical jokes, fortunately this day came to mean something different for RAHN USA.

We attended our first Radtech USA conference and exhibition in Chicago April 19^th-22^th, 1998. We have been ever present at this industry show increasing our footprint at the exhibition six fold compared to 1998. 

1999
Our first hire on the sales side was Steven Schmitt in 1999, another longtime employee, a Wisconsin native who uprooted his family and moved to Charlotte NC to handle the "eastern region".

The decision to open a lab in Aurora IL was also taken in late 1999.

First visit of Hans Konrad Rahn to check out the fledgling company

November 2000
Fortuitously, our distribution partner, Import Logistics Inc. (ILI), had plans for a new building at the same time. They broke ground on November 1^st, 2000. The lab became an integral part of the new building design. Werner Joho, our technical director at the time and our general manager, had many design, planning and execution meetings with ILI and their main contractor to get this job done.

September 2001
The new ILI building (now 140,000 square feet) including our lab and new office spacing) was opened in 2001. Sean Des Roches, our lab manager, was hired in March 2001. He moved his family from the East Coast to the Midwest and has been a valuable member of the team ever since.

On September 10^th, 2001 RAHN AG CEO Hans-Peter Ammann participated in a ceremony to dedicate a RAHN collection painting to ILI that still adorns the main meeting room today.

2006
Cosmetics began selling our own RAHN-Cosmetic Actives and a few traded products in the USA through RAHN USA Corp., and thereafter hired a Cosmetics sales representative.

2009
To increase the market penetration, Cosmetics moved away from having one single salesperson and started a collaboration with an agent covering the entire USA. RAHN USA's infrastructure such as customer service and warehousing were still operationally used.

2010
Ana Patricia Rahn Erden, Majority shareholder of RAHN AG,  and Pierre Jaccoud, Member of the Board of Directors of RAHN AG, visited RAHN USA in the year that the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupted, which delayed their return. This unplanned event provided another great opportunity to explore the fantastic city of Chicago.

2015 - 2022
Photoinitiator shortages caused by China's more aggressive approach to environmental problems and the recent COVID crisis have hit the photoinitiator industry hard from 2015 to 2022. However, RAHN USA coped remarkably well by using its strengths in supply chain and logistics, but not without making huge efforts to support this critical business sector.

2019
After a period of 10 years working with an agent, we finally transitioned Cosmetics USA to our own team, which consists of three sales representatives. The business is still developing and should breach $2M sales in 2023.

2023
Michael Gould, RAHN USA Corporation's Technical Key Account Manager, assumed the Radtech group's presidency for a two-year term starting January 2023.