Yervant Wei on Pairon Tools' Journey to $1 Million in Sales
This month, on 6/29/26, Pairon Tools crossed $1 million in gross sales on Shopify; sales we have made since launching our store in September 2025. For a company that started with a 13-year-old, his father, and a frustrating afternoon loading marble tiles, that number still feels surreal.
I'm Yervant Wei, founder of Pairon Tools, and I want to take a minute away from product specs and customer support to talk about how we got here, because the story behind the number matters as much as the number itself.
Where it started
In February 2023, I was helping my father, Robert, during a home remodeling project. Our job that day was loading construction materials, and the cargo was heavy: marble tiles, five to a package, lifted with a straddle stacker. Even with the machine doing the heavy lifting, we still had to manually carry each package over to the truck bed by hand. After a few runs, I was exhausted, and one thought kept repeating in my head: there has to be an easier way to do this.
That thought turned into a question. What if the cart itself could slide the load onto the truck bed? What if the entire cart could ride along too, instead of just the cargo?
I brought the idea to my dad, and we sketched out a design together. With his manufacturing background and industry connections, what started as a napkin idea slowly became something real.
Three years of building, before the first sale
The idea came easily. Turning it into a product took years.
We built our first prototype in June 2023, then refined it into a second prototype by November 2023. By late 2024, we started preparing for a Kickstarter campaign, and in January 2025 we launched our website and first ads to start building awareness ahead of launch.
In May 2025, we finalized the production-ready design, ordered materials, and launched the Kickstarter campaign itself. Mass production began that June, right as the campaign closed, and I had the chance to visit the factory in China where the carts were being built. From there, the carts shipped out in August (delayed slightly by customs and shipping), and by October 2025, every Kickstarter backer had their cart in hand. That same month, we also created our social media accounts to start building a public presence.
In between all of that, we opened our Shopify store in September 2025, the channel that would go on to generate our first million dollars in sales.
The product: the Liftmate Glide 200
All of that work led to our flagship product, the Liftmate Glide 200. It's a battery-powered lift cart that can carry up to 440 pounds, but the feature that sets it apart is the sliding mechanism: once the cart's platform is lifted to truck-bed height, it can slide sideways and rest directly on that surface. The user holds the cart steady, retracts the lift, and the rest of the cart glides on behind it. Unloading works the same way in reverse.
It sounds simple, but it solves a problem that's existed for as long as people have been loading trucks by hand: getting cargo and the cart itself onto a raised surface without straining your back or burning ten minutes per load.
We built it for contractors who load and unload trucks daily, for small business owners looking for a lower-cost alternative to forklifts, and for anyone who's ever felt the kind of fatigue I felt loading those tiles back in 2023, whether that's due to age, injury, or just wanting to work smarter.
$1 million, nine months in
Crossing $1 million in Shopify sales less than a year after opening the store is the number I'm most proud of, not because of the number itself, but because of what it represents: two and a half years of prototyping, a Kickstarter campaign, a factory visit, shipping delays, and a lot of learning on the fly about how to actually run a business while still in school.
I started this because I was tired of an inefficient process and thought there had to be a better way. I'm proud that Pairon Tools has grown into something that's helping other people skip that same frustration.
Thank you to everyone who has supported Pairon Tools along the way, especially my father, Robert, who turned a 13-year-old's idea into something real. We're just getting started.
— Yervant Wei, Founder, Pairon Tools