Really Right Stuff

A lot of camera gear is sold as "Arca-Swiss compatible," and according to Really Right Stuff, Arca-Swiss has never published a standard for what that means. So the camera support company, now run from Lehi, wrote its own and handed it around the industry. Its patents page still posts the critical dimensions of the RRS Dovetail Standard for any designer who wants to build something that fits.

The business began as a complaint about fit. Bryan Geyer put his savings and retirement funds into a fix for ill-fitting generic quick-release plates, and he spent the next twelve years making better ones.

In 2002 a longtime customer, Joseph Johnson Sr., bought the company. He moved his family from Shanghai to California's Central Coast to run it out of their garage. Most of us who love a piece of camera gear stop at writing a review.

Under Johnson the catalog grew from plates into tripods and ball heads. The BH-55, the biggest in the BH line, is rated for 50 pounds, though the head alone weighs 1.75 pounds. By 2018 the company was also getting into tripods for long-range rifles, KSBY reported. The BH-55 page now lists rifles with optics right alongside big lenses. Every product with the RRS name carries a five-year warranty to its original buyer.

The turning point was a building. The company had planned to expand its 18,500 square foot plant in San Luis Obispo, and after running the numbers Johnson found it would cost less and take less time to buy one in Utah. California had already turned down the company's application for a Cal Competes tax credit, KSBY reported.

In 2018 RRS opened a building of roughly 40,000 square feet in south Lehi, just off Pioneer Crossing, and about half of its 35 California employees moved with it. "Our employees can afford to buy homes here," Johnson said. Val Hale, then the head of Utah's Governor's Office of Economic Development, said at the time that the state needed more manufacturers that employ skilled machinists and assemblers. RRS fits the description.

The company says most of its production has come in-house since the move, and it makes and hand-assembles its products in the USA. The soft goods are the exception. RRS designs its tripod bags and pouches but buys them from a US company that sources from factories in Asia. The company says it is still looking for American-made replacements.

The plates still tie the system together. An RRS L-plate works in a Markins clamp, and Wimberley lens plates fit RRS clamps, the company says. Manfrotto and Gitzo keep their own systems that do not mix. That cross-brand fit exists because a small shop wrote down the numbers Arca-Swiss never published.