Jillian Helms has an awkward fact to share about the best-selling little tool in Leatherman’s history. Helms, a senior business unit manager at the company, says Tim Leatherman has been open about the Micra being a runaway hit, and that a full cost analysis run years after its 1996 launch showed the company had probably been losing money on the tool from the start.
Eleven million people bought one anyway. The design never changed. Not once.
Nobody at Leatherman saw the launch coming. The company had set up capacity to build roughly 5,000 Micras, a sensible plan for a 2.5-inch keychain tool in an unproven category.
The launch show rewrote the math in a weekend. Orders came in for more than 335,000 tools, 67 times the production plan, and the factory in Portland had no line staffed to build anywhere near that many, no parts staged for the volume, and no time to hire up before the orders came due. The order book was real. The capacity to fill it did not exist.
I have one, and I imagine many of you do too.
Read the whole thing at Gadgeteer.com
Leatherman sold 11 million of its tiniest tool and probably lost money doing it