By Matt Neznanski
Gazette-Times reporter | Posted: Friday, April 18, 2008 12:00 am
Leatherman founder brings tale of success to Corvallis
Tim Leatherman carries two of his famous multi-tools around all the time: the "Charge" full-size model, very similar to the original, and the tiny "Squirt," on his keys.
It makes sense that the inventor of the American version of the Swiss army knife would be prepared for anything, even when he's just talking to a group of Corvallis businesspeople.
"I'm kind of like a walking advertisement," he said.
Leatherman was the featured speaker at Thursday's Speakerlunch event, a monthly pep talk for area entrepreneurs.
During a nine-month European soul-searching trip in the mid-1970s with his wife, Leatherman, an Oregon State University mechanical engineering graduate, found his old Scout knife was fine for slicing bread but wanting when it came to car repairs. On a slip of paper he kept in his pocket for ideas, Leatherman wrote, "Put a pair of pliers on a pocketknife."
When he arrived back in Portland, he went to work developing just that. After creating patterns in cardboard, wood and metal and testing multiple types of pliers and folding blades for three years, he emerged with a test model and a plan.
"I thought this would be easy, I'd just go to the knife companies and they'd love this and pay me a million dollars," Leatherman said.
Instead, knife companies considered his prototype folding pliers a tool. When he took the contraption to tool makers, they labeled it a gadget.
After years of peddling the idea to various companies, Leatherman and business partner Steve Berliner decided to make the thing themselves and finally convinced mail-order retailers Cabela's and Seattle's Early Winters to carry the Personal Survival Tool.
From the initial purchase order of 500 units in 1983, Leatherman's business grew to making more than 1 million tools in just 10 years and today is a $90 million company that sells products in 70 countries.
As it turns out, Leatherman said, his invention was neither a pocketknife nor a tool. And that was what made it popular.
"The logical place in the middle was pocket tools and there was this big void in the middle," he said.
Matt Neznanski can be reached at 758-9518 or matt.neznanski@lee.net.