Leatherman has sold over 11 million of its tiny Micra multitools, but an unexpected discovery years later left the company admitting “we’d probably been losing money on it from the start”

Few products can claim to have survived 30 years without a significant redesign, let alone remain popular enough to keep attracting new customers.

Leatherman's Micra is one of those rare exceptions, having sold more than 11 million units since its introduction in 1996.

The tiny, scissors-based multitool has become an icon in the everyday carry (EDC) community, and its enduring popularity suggests Leatherman got the formula right from the beginning.

However, the story behind its success is considerably more complicated than it first appears.

According to Jillian Helms, Leatherman's senior business unit manager, the Micra was such an overwhelming success that it exposed a fundamental problem with the way the company understood its manufacturing costs.

"Tim [Leatherman] has been open that the Micra was a runaway hit, but years later a full cost analysis showed we'd probably been losing money on it from the start," Helms explains.

It seems that one of the company's most successful products may not have been particularly successful from a financial perspective, at least during its early years.

More orders than anyone expected

To understand how the Micra ended up in this unusual position, it's worth revisiting its extraordinary launch.

Leatherman had originally planned production capacity for approximately 5,000 tools, which presumably seemed reasonable for a miniature multitool built around scissors, which isn't the tool the company was known for (i.e. pliers).

What happened next caught everyone off guard. "When the Micra took off, we had planned capacity for about 5,000 tools, and the show produced orders for more than 335,000," Helms recalls.

Faced with demand that vastly exceeded its manufacturing plans, Leatherman had to find an unconventional way of getting the product into customers' hands.

"So we asked for volunteers to take kits home and build Micras over Thanksgiving. There are still people here who remember doing it with their families once the turkey was done."

It's a remarkable image, especially when you consider how large Leatherman has become, but the company's employees clearly understood they had something special on their hands.

"What stays with me is that the energy behind that moment never left," Helms adds. "You see it in product development, in manufacturing, in marketing, in every department."

The hidden cost of success

Of course, selling hundreds of thousands of multitools is one thing, but manufacturing them profitably is quite another, especially when the product in question requires unusually precise engineering.

"Making it the same every time is harder than it sounds. Smaller means harder," Helms explains when asked about the challenges of continuing to manufacture the Micra.

"You're packing a lot of complexity into a tiny footprint, which takes tight tolerances and complex manufacturing systems. And it has to stay at a price people can afford."

The Micra was never intended to be an expensive specialist tool, and Leatherman had to justify charging considerably more than someone might pay for ordinary scissors.

As Helms explains, Tim Leatherman originally established a fairly ambitious benchmark for the product. "Before the Micra existed, Tim wrote that if we were selling a $20 to $30 tool into a market full of $2 scissors, it had to be the last scissors you'd ever need to buy."

The commitment to making something durable and genuinely useful helped establish the Micra's reputation, but it also meant delivering a relatively complicated product at an accessible price.

Helms doesn't reveal how much money Leatherman might have lost on the Micra, or for how long, but the retrospective discovery clearly left its mark on the company.

"His takeaway was to get good at the boring stuff, like knowing the true cost of what you make. That lesson made us stronger."

The value of leaving things alone

Despite the potentially expensive lesson, Leatherman has remained remarkably faithful to the Micra's original design.

Manufacturing methods have evolved, with better equipment and increased automation helping the company maintain its standards, but the basic concept remains much the same as it was in 1996.

And while plenty of technology companies seem determined to release updated products every year, Leatherman has adopted a different philosophy.

"We're always asking what's next, and the Micra is no exception," Helms says. "But the question is whether a change makes it better or just different."

The company's reluctance to interfere with a successful design makes sense, particularly considering how many people continue to buy the Micra.

"The original was built to a very exacting standard, and so far, the honest answer is that it still does its job."

Thirty years and more than 11 million sales later, the Micra remains a reminder that commercial popularity and profitability aren't necessarily the same thing.

It's also proof that a product doesn't always need reinventing to stay relevant, even if its manufacturer had to learn some expensive lessons along the way.

The Micra is available now at Leatherman US, Leatherman UK and Leatherman EU for $49.95 / £54.95 / €59 (~AU$72). AU price and availability TBC.