Put on your imagination hats because it’s story time. It’s a nine-month European excursion in the 1970’s. (Cue The Who’s music) You’ve successfully helped your beau (translation: bae) save their parents from a refugee camp and this excursion is to not only to celebrate that liberation, but your shared passion for travel.
You’ve visited copious amounts of beautiful sites overflowing with culture, history and picturesque memories and to top it all of you have purchased a cantankerous car. (If you’re going to do Europe, it’s go big or go home.) And undoubtedly, your new couple ton buddy doesn’t seem to want to join in on the European excitement. It’s probably the Great Grandfather to the Oldsmobile. You find yourself tinkering with your four-wheeled companion with the tools that you have on hand, and while you’re finding some success the wheels in your head are whirling at top speed. Being a mechanical engineer by trade, you wonder how truly handy it would be to have a pocket-sized tool that contained every necessity.
You pull out a folded piece of paper and write “#13: Multipurpose Tool” under your ever growing bucket list. You have decided this adventure has become a “What Am I Going To Do With My Life” voyage. You desperately want to make this multipurpose tool a reality, so your deadline is set to one month. Unfortunately, one month becomes three to four years. You are a mechanical engineer with the correct brainpower, but you’re just a little unsure on how to go about manufacturing the product. No one seems to be willing to take the bait on your idea.
This three to four years turns into an eight years creator’s block. You have a friend who is business savvy, let’s call him Steve, and he decided it’s time to start exploring other options. You and your buddy Steve start contacting the right kinds of magazines, and end up reaching out to a fairly popular hunting store named Cabela’s. With the help of Cabela’s you receive your first 500 orders, which rapidly grows to 500 more.
You now have your own storefront in 90 countries and are nationally known. Almost seems a little crazy, or like any other story right? Well here is where the real craziness kicks in, this isn’t just an imagination created story, but it’s how Leatherman came to be.
That’s right, Tim Leatherman took the exact same European excursion I told you all about with his wife, and in the midst of a cantankerous car tantrum, started to formulate the idea for the pocket sized multipurpose tool that many people know and love today.
While the adventurous spirit was conceived in Europe, Tim has transferred that essence to the Leatherman brand, which has been in operation for over 30 years. That same risk taking mentality is implemented throughout the company as a core value of the brand. Along with risk taking, the ideal of preparedness follows suit, because you cannot have one without the other.
Being prepared requires at the very minimum, a bit of risk taking. Tim took a leap of faith with his car. He took a leap of faith by starting Leatherman. He took a leap of faith by going after his love of travel and his impending bucket list. In risking a decade of his life to create the perfect tool, Tim Leatherman prepared future generations for the next adventure.
We challenge Leatherman to continue taking risks. This could be as simple as expanding their audience to women, or as daring as expanding on a larger scale. The question at hand is not of Leatherman’s success. The question at hand is whether or not they dare to take one more risk.
