Leatherman

To lead the high-quality compact multi-purpose tool market by providing the best value for our customers, being the most innovative, and continuously improving while meeting our financial goals, providing a rewarding work environment and operating legally and ethically. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rules that competitors can faithfully copy Leatherman's tool without violating trademark laws. Leatherman Tool Group, Inc. originated the multipurpose tool and a new market niche when it began catalog sales of its Pocket Survival Tool in 1983. Since that time, the company has expanded its offerings to include nearly two dozen different hand-held multi-tools that sell in 70 countries around the world. The idea that led to the formation of the Leatherman Tool Group occurred to Tim Leatherman during his honeymoon. After leaving Saigon, where he married in 1975, Leatherman and his wife spent ten months touring Europe in a used 1968 Fiat that they bought for three hundred dollars. Staying in ramshackle lodgings and working on his sometimes temperamental car, Leatherman conceived of what later became the Pocket Survival Tool and, in a Tehran hotel, he made his first cardboard model. "At times the faucets didn't have handles and there was no way to turn the water on with the Boy Scout knife I carried," Leatherman was quoted in a 1985 Oregonian article. Instead of months, it took Leatherman until late 1978 to develop the tool he wanted, a five-ounce, four-inch stainless steel tool that came with large and small screwdrivers, a file, scissors, a can opener, punch, ruler, knife blades, and pliers that popped out when the tool was opened. He began by modifying pliers, working with basic hand tools in his garage. In 1980, he received a patent on his "Mr. Crunch." Leatherman took a job selling welding supplies by day while he wrote and visited companies all over the United States, introducing them to his tool. He even pitched his idea to 23 of the largest purchasing organizations in the country, from the U.S. Army to AT&T. No one was interested. "Unfortunately, nobody wanted to buy my invention. The knife companies thought it was a tool; the tool companies thought it was a knife," he is quoted as saying on the company's Web site. Leatherman continued to refine his design with the help of Steve Berliner, a college friend whose father owned and operated a machine shop, Simplicity Tool Co. The two originally saw their invention as an industrial product to be sold directly to large companies--standard equipment to be carried by telephone technicians, for example. That vision changed during a sales call to Early Winters catalogue, where someone advised Leatherman fortuitously to simplify and refine the tool to emphasize only its most widely useful features. Three days after its catalog was out, Early Winters had sold 250 of Leatherman's tools and asked for more. Two weeks later, they came back with a request for another 1,000. The new company now faced a problem: it did not have the capacity to keep up with the orders that kept pouring in. By June 1984, Leatherman had shipped 4,000, but was about three months behind on deliveries. By Christmas 1984, close to 30,000 knives had been shipped. All knives came with a 25-year, no-questions-asked warranty. Through the remainder of the 1980s, the Pocket Survival Tool was alone in the multipurpose tool market. Then, in the early 1990s, Leatherman began to face competition. Portland-based Gerber Legendary Blades, one of the companies that had shown no interest in Tim Leatherman's prototype, introduced its own pocket tool, the Multi-Plier. So did SOG Specialty Knives of Edmonds, Washington, with its Paratool. Coast Cutlery of Portland brought out the Pocket Mechanic. Buck Knives of El Cajon, California, teamed up with the manufacturer of the Swiss Army knife, Wegner, to make the Swissbuck. Competition brought lawsuits. In 1991, Leatherman won a $50,000 judgment--the first of many--in a trademark inf