The perfect tool, and no one wanted it

By IRENE CHAPPLE

When his young son Lee was diagnosed with leukaemia, Tim Leatherman's eight-year quest for the perfect pocket tool stuttered and almost stopped.

His wife Chau's income had supported the three as Leatherman hammered out his dream in various garages.

Chau quit the workforce to look after their only child.

"He was 2 1/2, and that was also right at the beginning of the [Leatherman tool's] production," recalls Chau.

Leatherman now runs a global empire reaping more than US$80 million ($163 million) in annual sales. Lee, now 20, is fully recovered and studying earth systems at Stanford University in California.

"I have got lucky twice in my life," says Leatherman. "I have never bought a lottery ticket.

"The form of leukaemia my son had, only one in four survives, and the odds of [an idea] being patented, well, only one in a hundred ever gets on the marketplace. There are far more that never even get patented.

"I have been very fortunate."

The Leatherman story is almost a rags to riches cliche.

Possibly the greatest divergence from that image is Leatherman himself, visiting New Zealand for the first time and rushing through some business before taking three weeks' holiday.

Far from any caricature of the pushy American millionaire, he is quietly spoken, bespectacled, dressed in fleece and jeans and lugging a bundle of bags.

Vietnamese-born Chau wears a high-collared black suit jacket, casual jeans and red slip-on sandals.

They met when Chau was studying business education in the United States in the early 1970s, and Leatherman followed her back to Vietnam.

"I was the only American of my generation to pay his own way to Vietnam," says Leatherman. "Everyone else was going the other way."

Watching Vietnamese children clattering around on makeshift motorbikes, Leatherman started to get a little jealous. When the bikes broke down, as they frequently did, the youngsters would pull them apart, fix them and hit the road again.

Leatherman, a former scout, was impressed. The images stayed with him after the couple, with Chau's family, fled to the United States in 1975.

The two then embarked on what Leatherman calls a "What are we going to do with the rest of our lives?" budget trip around Europe.

That trip, with its US$300 ($613) car, frozen radiators and lack of a decent fix-it tool, shaped the rest of their lives.

The scout knife Tim had with him could cut bread and cheese, but could not fix the car or bad plumbing. Inspired by the innovative Vietnamese children and frustrated by the lack of a decent pocket tool, Leatherman dreamed up the perfect prototype.

On his return to Oregon - now headquarters for the company - he locked himself away to turn the prototype into reality.

He has kept a record of the process: 12 photographs, each showing a variance on the Leatherman tool, sunk lovingly into red casing. The evolution is obvious, even without the tidy black numbering at the bottom.

The first shot shows the outline of a pocket tool, cut from cardboard.

By picture five, it is made of rough scrap metal. By that time, Leatherman was getting blood blisters from the pliers handles.

The product was still faulty. He worked on, taking a job selling welding products to help the family.

Pictures 11 and 12 are close relatives of the tool that now sells in 94 countries.

"I guess if there is one word to describe me, it would be persistent," understates Leatherman.

"On my 30th birthday I went to bed and tears starting coming down, and I thought 'What am I doing with my life. What do I have to show for all this time?'

"But I am a resilient person, and the next day I got up and carried on."

He needed that persistence because Leatherman could not sell what he believed was the perfect product.

No one was interested. Some outlets thought the Leatherman was too gimmicky and unlikely to last.

"We've seen those before and they don't sell," he was told.

Others were confused by the mix of pocket knife and practical tools, and declined to stock something not within their product range.

Leatherman approached 22 sectors of government - the Army among others - and was rejected by all. He did not even receive letters of receipt from 20 sectors, despite acknowledgment being required by law.

Leatherman finally made his breakthrough when a mail-order catalogue took 500 tools.

"For a while I was ecstatic. I was climbing the walls and walking across the ceiling. After eight years I had finally made a sale.

"Then I came down and thought, 'That's 500 - we need sales of 4000 to go into production'."

But the initial sale was simply a tease: 30,000 units were ordered that year.

Leatherman credits the surprise success to the tool's quality, which is backed by a 25-year warranty.

Now a Leatherman tool - which comes in a dozen variations - sells every six minutes - more than two million annually.

New Zealanders are big buyers. Although exact sales figures are unavailable, this country is one of the top 10 export markets on a per capita basis.

While the tool has been challenged by cheap imitations, particularly from China, Leatherman has protected his products with dozens of lawsuits and now claims 50 per cent of the US market.

Even when just tripping around Auckland, he sports two Leatherman tools on his belt.

"The business I am in is preparedness," Leatherman explains. "If you think of it like that, there are plenty of opportunities for the future."