Entrepreneurial Strategies 139A Gripping Experience
Inventor Dan Brown entered the maturing
hand-tool market literally with a twist: He
introduced a wrench-pliers hybrid with tiny
jaws inside its circular head that grasps 16
different sizes of bolts or nuts evenly when
you squeeze the tool’s ergonomic handles.
Known as the Bionic Wrench, this eight-inch
tool saves handymen from bringing fixed-
head wrenches in multiple sizes to every job,
and is quicker to use than traditional
adjustable wrenches. It’s also particularly
effective with nuts and bolts that are
“stripped” or worn around the edges, user-
friendly for people who don’t have a lot of
strength in their hands, and it works with both
metric and standard-sized equipment.
Brown knows he has a good product. The
Bionic Wrench was selected by Popular
Mechanicsmagazine to receive its Editor’s
Choice award for outstanding achievement in
new-product design at the 2005 National
Hardware Show; it also won a 2006
International Forum Design Award in
Germany and an International Industrial and
Graphic Design Award from the Chicago
Athenaeum.
But accolades may not carry enough
weight for the Bionic Wrench to succeed.
National retailer, Home Depot Inc., has
declined to carry the product. Buyer Billy
Bastek explains, “Hundreds and hundreds
and hundreds of new products come across
my desk every year, and that doesn’t even
include all the inquiries from our Web site.”
One factor turned Bastek against the product.
“I thought the Bionic Wrench was somewhat
of a neat item, but I didn’t think it was priced
particularly well, and that’s kind of it.” In con-
trast, the hand-tool buyer for Ace Hardware
was eager to stock the Bionic Wrench in his
2,600 retailer-owned hardware cooperative
stores, even at its $32.95 suggested retail
price. “There are a handful of items to grab
onto for the year, and we said, ‘This might be
one of them,’ and we rolled the dice,” says
Dan Crane.
Bionic Wrench’s price is high because the
tool is manufactured in the United States.
Brown could produce the item more cheaply
by moving production to China, but he says,
“I want to show this can be done in the
States.” Brown has also resisted making
deals with chain stores like Sears and Lowe’s
to produce a version for their Craftsman or
Kobalt private label, because he fears the
chains would discount the retail price too
much. Instead, he promotes the Bionic
Wrench on his own Web site (www.logger-
headtools.com), under a slogan that promis-
es “a gripping experience.” He plans to intro-
duce the wrench in six- and ten-inch sizes, in
addition to offering a multi-purpose tool, a
Bionic pipe cutter and three additional
wrenches.
Bionic Wrench racked up sales of
$800,000 in 2005. Now that the wrench is
being carried not only by Ace Hardware but
also by QVC, Hammacher Schlemmer,
Canadian Tire Corporation, and other retail-
ers, Brown hopes to reach a sales volume of
$6 to $8 million in 2006. That’s pretty good—
even if it’s not as good as the sales figure for
the other guy named Dan Brown, the one
who wrote The DaVinci Code.
SOURCE:Adapted from Gwendolyn Bounds, “Wrench
Wins Awards, but Is It Priced Too High to Be a Hit?” The
Wall Street Journal, March 21, 2006. Retrieved from the
Web March 21, 2006.
http://online.wsj.com/article_print.SB1 14289721659203443
.html, and http://www.loggerheadtools.comSTREET STORY 4.3