In 2005, a Hong Kong conglomerate bought Milwaukee for $626 million and poured money into it. In 2017, an American conglomerate bought Craftsman for $900 million and built a factory that couldn't stamp its own name on a socket.
Same playbook. Opposite results. This is the story of what happened to every tool brand on the shelf.
If you're coming from the r/Tools post, welcome! What you are reading here is an extended version of that post. About half of what follows is new - thank you to the Redditors who DM’ed me to help fill in some of the extra details in this investigation.
The two conglomerates
Techtronic Industries (TTI) is a Hong Kong company founded in 1985. They own Milwaukee, Ryobi, and manufacture Ridgid power tools under license from Emerson Electric. They bought Milwaukee from Atlas Copco in 2005 for about $626 million.
At the time, Milwaukee was a respected but mid-tier brand known mostly for Sawzalls and hole hawgs. TTI also owns the floor care brands Hoover, Dirt Devil, and Oreck, though those haven't gotten the same love.
Stanley Black & Decker (SBD) is the result of Stanley Works merging with Black & Decker in 2010. That merger created a company that already owned DeWalt, and from there they went on a tear. Craftsman from Sears for $900 million. Irwin and Lenox from Newell Brands for $1.95 billion. They absorbed Porter-Cable, Bostitch, MAC Tools, Proto Industrial, and Vidmar.
Over $6 billion in acquisitions since 2002. At one point they owned so many brands in the same category that their own products were cannibalizing each other on the same store shelves.
Both companies bought up everything. What they did next is where the story splits.
TTI: Buy it, invest in it, leave it alone
TTI bought Milwaukee and basically let it run itself. Kept the R&D operation in Brookfield, WI. Kept the engineering team intact. Dumped $206 million into R&D in a single year. More than 4.4% of total sales going straight back into product development, every year.
The results showed up fast. M12 and M18 launched within two years of the acquisition. Then FUEL brushless motors. Then ONE-KEY, the first digital platform for tools and equipment that lets you track inventory, customize torque settings, and lock a tool remotely if it gets stolen. Then PACKOUT modular storage, which turned a plastic box into an ecosystem. Then MX FUEL, pushing cordless into concrete saws and breakers that used to require a gas engine or a generator.
Milwaukee's Brookfield campus went from 190,000 square feet to over 500,000. They opened a $100 million campus in Menomonee Falls. A manufacturing plant in West Bend. Facilities in Greenwood and Grenada, MS. In the last five years alone, Milwaukee has invested $368 million in domestic expansion.
Wisconsin headcount went from around 300 in 2011 to over 2,000. Across the US, Milwaukee now employs over 5,900 people. Globally, the company now has over 10,000 employees and generates roughly $8 billion in revenue on its own.
Their portfolio strategy is clean. Ryobi handles DIY at Home Depot. Milwaukee handles pros. The two brands don't eat each other. They serve different people at different price points with different expectations, and TTI lets each one keep its own identity, its own engineering, its own product roadmap.
TTI did $14.6 billion in revenue last year with $44 million in net debt. The founders still own roughly 24% of the company. Milwaukee grew 11.6%.
SBD: Buy it, merge it, cut it
Stanley Black & Decker took the opposite approach.
The 2010 merger of Stanley Works and Black & Decker created a company that already owned DeWalt. From there they went on an acquisition spree that should have built an empire. Instead it built a bloated holding company drowning in debt and leadership turnover.
They bought so many brands they were competing with themselves on the same store shelves, then starved the weaker ones to feed DeWalt.
The tools division has been a revolving door at the top. After the previous head left, two executives served as acting co-presidents before Chris Nelson was brought in from Carrier Corporation in June 2023. Nelson had zero tool industry background. He'd been running an HVAC division. Before that, McKinsey and Johnson & Johnson.
The CEO who hired him didn't last much longer. Donald Allan Jr. stepped aside in October 2025 after three years in the role, leaving behind a stock price that had dropped roughly 50% from its 2021 peak. Three years, two billion dollars in cost cuts, 7,000 jobs eliminated, and the guy who ordered all of it still couldn't make the numbers work.
The cost-cutting has been relentless. SBD launched a $2 billion "cost reduction and operational simplification" program. Since late 2023, they've cut roughly 7,000 employees globally. Closed plants in South Carolina and Texas. Sold off their aerospace fastener business to Howmet for $1.8 billion in cash. The total workforce dropped from about 48,500 to 43,500 in a single year. Annual filings show $141 million in restructuring charges in 2022 and another $39 million in 2023.
SBD is carrying $6.1 billion in long-term debt.
And then the New Britain closure. In February 2026, SBD announced it was shutting down its manufacturing plant on Myrtle Street in New Britain, CT. 300 jobs gone.
The facility made tape measures. The company said demand for single-sided tape measures was in "structural decline." New Britain is the city where Stanley was literally founded in 1843. Locals call it "Hardware City" because of Stanley. The former mayor's response: "How many times are we going to see this movie?"
Craftsman: A $90 million lesson in failure
Craftsman was never really a manufacturer. Under Sears, they sourced from 203 different vendors across the product line. The biggest was Emerson Electric for power tools, followed by Vermont American and Western Forge for hand tools. Sears had to warranty the items themselves because the vendors wouldn't.
Craftsman was always a name on other people's products. A brand licensing operation with a lifetime guarantee stapled to it.
SBD bought that name from Sears in 2017 for $900 million. Said they were going to "bring back its American manufacturing heritage." A heritage that never existed. They built a $90 million automated factory in Fort Worth, Texas. Was supposed to employ 500 people.
The automation didn't work. Ratchets were coming out of the press misshapen. Sockets went through heat treating without the brand name stamped on them. Metal wasn't getting fully punched out. Retailers couldn't get complete sets, so they canceled orders.
The executive who launched the project left in 2020. Got replaced by four different people in four years. The SEC later hit the company for failing to disclose $1.3 million in executive perks, including private jet use.
They shut the factory down in March 2023. 175 workers at the end. Not 500. The few tool sets that factory actually produced are now collectors' items on eBay. Collectible because of how awful they are. A $90 million factory that ran for about three years and its main legacy is ironically valuable socket sets.
SBD didn't just fail to run a manufacturing company. They failed to run a brand licensing operation. That's supposed to be the easy version.
Craftsman wrenches are made in India now. Their quality perception score dropped from 61 to 55, the biggest decline in the entire tool category.
Porter-Cable: The saddest story in tools
If the Craftsman failure is the most public, Porter-Cable is the most painful.
Porter-Cable was founded in 1906. They invented the portable belt sander. The helical-drive circular saw. The Speedmatic router that professional woodworkers built entire shops around. In 1996, the Smithsonian Institution collected their company history as part of the American manufacturing record. They were that important.
By the early 2000s, Porter-Cable was widely considered the highest quality line of woodworking power tools available in America. When distributors worked trade shows, a significant chunk of their booth time was spent listening to customers talk about the Porter-Cable tools in their garages. How long they'd had them. How they still ran perfectly. The service centers were staffed by people who could recite 14-digit part numbers for bearings off the top of their heads.
Porter-Cable once discontinued the 126 door plane because the tooling to build them had worn out. After an outcry from the contractor community, they retooled the machines and brought the plane back. It was simply the best tool in the world for installing doors. That's the kind of company it was. Professional, passionate, invested.
SBD bought them in 2004. The cheapening of internal components started immediately.
According to a former tool industry representative who spent 30 years in the business, the plan was clear from day one. Cheapen the internals to build more profit margin into each unit. Discontinue large portions of the product line, including iconic legacy tools the brand was built on. The service centers closed within roughly six months of the acquisition.
The reps who built their careers on the Porter-Cable name were fired shortly after. One of the best in the industry saw what was happening early, left for Metabo, and stayed there for almost two decades. That tells you the caliber of people SBD pushed out the door.
Router line discontinued. Social media went dark for years. No new product development. You can still find some Porter-Cable stuff at Tractor Supply, but the brand is functionally dead.
A 118-year-old company. Important enough for the Smithsonian to preserve. Reduced to clearance bin filler.
Metabo: What consolidation looks like at the human level
Metabo was a family-owned German company. They made some of the best angle grinders and metalworking tools on the market. SBD had courted them for years because Metabo was their biggest competition in the metal grinding channel. Metabo always said no. They knew SBD would gut them.
Eventually Metabo was sold to a private equity firm. That firm sold them to KKR, which had also acquired the tool division from Hitachi. KKR got everything from Hitachi except the brand name, with one year to rebrand.
Globally, the tools were rebranded as HiKoki. In the US, they went with Metabo HPT. The CEO told the sales force that HiKoki tested poorly in American focus groups and Metabo had strong US name recognition. On paper this made sense. In practice it was bizarre. Hitachi was a nail gun company in the US. The metalworking channel had zero association with the name "Metabo HPT." Nobody knew what it was.
Key people started leaving. The remaining sales force was told repeatedly that Metabo and Metabo HPT would remain independent companies. Nothing to worry about.
Around September 2022, a companywide sales meeting was called.
At that meeting, the merger was announced. Every independent manufacturer's rep in the country was fired. 80 salespeople. Some of them had spent their entire careers building the Metabo brand in America. Several of those agencies were generational. Fathers and grandfathers had built businesses on their Metabo relationship going back to when the brand first entered the US market.
They were replaced by 16 Hitachi direct sales people who already had full-time jobs selling nails and nail guns. Zero metalworking expertise. Zero channel relationships. They just needed warm bodies with existing paychecks.
Several rep agencies went out of business entirely. Others never recovered. One former managing partner of a rep agency, who'd spent 30 years in the tool industry, walked away from his company with nothing after two years of trying to rebuild. The decades of consolidation and the destructive influence of private equity in the industry were a major part of why he left.
This is what the spreadsheet doesn't show. The financial filings talk about "restructuring charges" and "workforce optimization." In reality it's 80 people in a conference room finding out their careers are over because a private equity firm broke a promise.
The Milwaukee counterpoint
I'd be full of shit if I wrote all of this and pretended TTI was perfect.
TTI did the acquisition strategy right. They invested where SBD cut. The results speak for themselves in the revenue numbers and the market share trajectory. But Milwaukee isn't flawless.
Multiple tradespeople and repair technicians report that newer Milwaukee tools have switched to bottom-of-the-barrel bearings. The kind you'd expect to find in a store-brand budget tool. Spare parts for repair are badly priced, frequently unavailable, or only sold in assemblies that include a bunch of components you don't need. One repair technician estimates he can only economically fix a Milwaukee tool about 30-40% of the time. For Makita, that number is 80-90%.
The Surge hydraulic driver line had QC issues that Milwaukee never publicly acknowledged. Tools with the same part number shipped with measurably different performance. That's the kind of thing that erodes trust with the exact professionals who built the brand's reputation in the first place.
None of this erases the contrast between TTI and SBD. But growth brings its own pressures. Time will tell whether TTI starts making the same cost-cutting mistakes once Milwaukee's growth rate slows down. Every company eventually faces the temptation to harvest what it built. The ones that resist it are the ones that last.
The ones that never sold
A few companies watched all of this happen and said no.
Klein has been family-owned since 1857. Sixth generation, still private. Their core lineman's pliers remain the industry standard. Though it's worth noting that they've started slapping the Klein name on a wider range of white-label products, and the quality on some of those newer items doesn't match the reputation. The legacy tools are still excellent. The expansion products are a gamble.
Makita has been independent since 1915. They're owned by Makita. They make Makita. No parent company, no conglomerate, no PE firm in the background. Multiple tradespeople swear by their ergonomics, vibration resistance, and longevity. Their batteries are overpriced and the US market gets a fraction of the product line that Japan gets, which is its own frustration. But nobody's gutting them from the inside.
Knipex is family-owned out of Germany. They make what many consider the best pliers on the planet. Part of a larger group (Knipex Group) but not publicly traded, not for sale.
Channellock is still owned and operated by the founder's descendants. US-made hand tools. They've quietly stayed private while everyone around them got acquired.
Hilti is owned by a family trust and still operates as a family company. Their customer service is legendary. One commenter shared that he bought bolts from them once in 2010 and they still have a dedicated service rep who calls him twice a year. He buys bolts out of guilt now.
Bosch is a private company owned by the Robert Bosch Foundation. Their power tools division is basically a rounding error in their overall business. They make everything from fuel injection systems to dishwashers to automotive sensors. Different beast entirely.
These companies prove the same thing from the opposite direction. You don't have to get acquired. You don't have to take the PE money. You can just keep making good products and telling everyone else to go to hell. It's harder, and it's slower, and the growth chart won't impress a Wall Street analyst. But the tools last. And the brand means something 50 years from now instead of ending up in a clearance bin.
The pattern
This isn't a tools story.
This is what happens in every industry once the conglomerates and private equity firms show up. Acquire the brand. Consolidate the operations. Cut costs. Extract value. Move to the next one.
The names change. The industries change. The strategy doesn’t.
I wrote about the same pattern in backpacks a couple weeks ago. VF Corporation, a former lingerie company, owns JanSport, The North Face, Eastpak, Kipling, and Eagle Creek. Same playbook. Different aisle.
Eyewear is next. One Italian company owns Ray-Ban, Oakley, LensCrafters, Sunglass Hut, and the insurance you use to pay for your glasses. They own the brands, the retail stores, and the payment pipeline. That one is going to be fun.
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