How a broken Fiat became a $136 million company in Portland.

In 1975, a young engineer named Tim Leatherman was driving a $300 Fiat across Europe with his wife. The car kept breaking down. The hotel plumbing kept leaking. All he had was a pocketknife. It wasn’t enough.

So he went home to Portland, Oregon and spent eight years building something better. A pliers-based multi-tool that could fit in your pocket. He filed for a patent in 1978 and received it in 1980. Nobody wanted it. He pitched it to knife companies. They passed. He pitched it to AT&T. They passed. Then in 1983, he started selling direct through mail-order catalogs. It took off.

Forty-two years later, Leatherman Tool Group is still in Portland. Still private. Still making every multi-tool in the same city. And the Wave+ — their best seller — costs about $110. I traced where that money goes.

Estimated breakdown based on hand tool industry benchmarks and Leatherman’s publicly available information.

Materials take about $28 — roughly a quarter of the price. The Wave+ is built from 420HC stainless steel for the blades and 17-4 precipitation-hardened stainless for the body. Add springs, rivets, brass pins, and the locking mechanisms for all 18 tools. Every piece is precision-cut. The majority of materials are sourced domestically, though some components are imported.

Labor and the factory take another $25. That covers the Portland workers who stamp, grind, heat-treat, assemble, and hand-inspect every unit. The factory overhead — equipment, energy, quality control — is baked in. About 525 employees work in Portland making these tools.

R&D eats about $6 per tool. That pays for the engineering that makes 18 tools fold into a 4-inch package. It also funds new developments like the MagnaCut blade steel in the Wave Alpha. Another $8 goes to marketing and brand. Tim Leatherman’s quote says it all: “It has to be perfect. My name is on every tool.”

The retailer — REI, Home Depot, Amazon — keeps about $30. That’s 27% of the sticker price. And Leatherman’s profit? Roughly $13 per tool. Not fat. But steady enough to keep the company private, profitable, and in Portland for 42 years.

Here’s what makes Leatherman rare. Almost every consumer product we use is made overseas. Your phone. Your clothes. Most of your kitchen gadgets. Leatherman could have moved production to China years ago and tripled its margins. It didn’t.

Instead, it doubled down. Opened a second Portland factory in 2025 for its new knife line. Named a new CEO, Kris Hamper, in January 2026. And launched Leatherman Exchange — a peer-to-peer resale marketplace — because when your tools last 25 years, you might as well help people trade them.

Leatherman is private, so you can’t buy shares. But the hand tool sector tells a broader story. Snap-on (NYSE: SNA) makes premium tools in Kenosha, Wisconsin — $4.7 billion in revenue, a 25% operating margin. Klein Tools, founded in 1857, is still private and still makes electrician’s tools in Illinois. Channellock has been in Meadville, Pennsylvania since 1886.

These companies survived offshoring because their customers — tradespeople, first responders, military — demand tools that work every time. Price matters less than trust. That’s a moat no Chinese factory can cross.

For public market exposure, Snap-on is the closest proxy. It’s the Leatherman of mechanic’s tools — premium, domestic, and priced for professionals. The Buy America requirements we covered yesterday only widen the moat. When every federally funded job site must use American-made tools, companies like these win by default.