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The unsuccessful attempt to open a highly automated Craftsman tooling factory in the US underscores the challenges American companies face in bringing manufacturing back from overseas.
Craftsman, the world’s largest tool brand owned by Stanley Black & Decker, first announced in 2019 it would build a $90 million facility in Fort Worth, Texas, employing up to 500 people. The effort was seen as an opportunity to showcase Craftsman products made with state-of-the-art Made in the USA manufacturing technologies to make the automated factory competitive with foreign facilities that use more manual processes.
The factory was scheduled to start production 18 months after groundbreaking. However, the pandemic and supply chain challenges derailed those plans, and deficiencies in the technology that would help automate manufacturing processes prevented the plant from ever reaching its full potential. In March 2023, Stanley announced that the Craftsman plant in Fort Worth would be closing.
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Earlier this year, Craftsman closed its Forth Worth manufacturing plant as part of a cost-cutting effort after the plant struggled with technical issues and pandemic-related supply chain issues. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images / Getty Images)
A spokesman for Stanley Black & Decker told FOX Business, “We have strived to create Craftsman mechanical tools in new and innovative ways. The events of Covid and the challenges in the supply chain, coupled with technology that did not meet our expectations, led to the cessation of operations.”
Former employees told The Wall Street Journal that the pandemic has prevented proper testing of machines, which is a key part of the company’s automated vision for the factory. That led the company to make a choice: either make adjustments by sourcing new tooling from overseas in hopes of fixing the problem – a process that could take weeks – or run the machine at half capacity, which would have hurt its cost-efficiency.
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Crafting tools produced at the Fort Worth plant included wrenches, sockets and ratchets – some of which are sold as collectibles on eBay. (Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)
As planned, the factory should produce sockets, ratchets and wrenches. But problems with the heat treatment of the tools, which sometimes came out of the machine with excess metal causing the tools to be deformed, hampered the factory’s production. Former employees, including tool designer Greg Heltne, told the Wall Street Journal that while the factory makes thousands of sockets, the shortage of ratchets and wrenches is affecting sales.
“If the customer says, ‘I want everything I ordered,’ and we can’t deliver it, there’s not much that can be done,” Heltne told the Journal.
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Sears sold Craftsman to Stanley Black & Decker in 2017 for $900 million. ((Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images / Getty Images)
Craftsman’s parent company, Stanley, was forced to make cuts in 2022 as its inventories fell from their pandemic highs, in part due to a decline in tool sales, leading to inventory build-ups. That led to layoffs at the Fort Worth plant, which employed about 175 people at the time the closure was announced in March — far fewer than the 500 people originally planned.
| ticker | Security | Last | Change | Change % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SWK | STANLEY BLACK & DECKER INC. | 97.13 | -0.46 | -0.47% |
The Fort Worth factory was expected to produce 60 million tools a year, but after the plant closed, it was unclear whether full sets of the Texas-made tools would make it to consumers. A Wall Street Journal reporter bought an 88-piece set labeled “Forged in Texas” at Lowe’s near Chicago on Monday. Although the set was purchased for $89.98, the relative scarcity of factory-made tool sets has made them collectibles, and some eBay sellers are asking for double that price.
Craftsman was acquired by Stanley from Sears in 2017 for $900 million in what then-CEO James Loree described as an opportunity to “re-Americanize” the brand. Several other U.S. facilities owned by Craftsman and competing toolmaking brands continue to produce tools, although these generally involve more manual tasks in the manufacturing processes than what was attempted at the Fort Worth facility and are more consistent with Craftsman tools made in facilities in Asia.
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Nick Pinchuk, CEO of premium tool brand Snap-on, told The Wall Street Journal that the company’s U.S. factories had a worker-to-robot ratio of about 100-to-1 in 2010, which has shrunk to 8-to-1 through a process that helped the company better understand which roles are better suited for humans than machines.
“Sometimes the simplicity of automation gets a little overstated,” Pinchuk told the Journal. “The reason is that people don’t really understand how the product is even made.”