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Justin Myers is the owner, designer and engineer of R.A.E. Gear USA, an Illinois-based manufacturer that has moved thousands of units on Etsy. What Myers has correctly identified a market for, then designed and fabricated, is a series of metal sheaths for popular multitools made by Gerber, Leatherman and Victorinox.
By adding magnets to the inside, Myers cleverly enables the tool to not only be held fast, but opened one-handed:
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Myers sells his sheathes through both the company website and Etsy, where he's doing a brisk business--and most importantly, netting rave reviews for both the quality of the product and the customer service. (He's 5-stars-out-of-5 with over 2,500 sales.) He appears to make sheathes for every multi-tool each manufacturer makes.
This is a smart business, and Myers proves that Made-in-the-USA is still possible. While metal is expensive these days, he's created a useful and desirable metal object that's small enough (i.e. uses little enough of an expensive material) that he can profitably sell them at $30 a pop. I think $30 is an easy click for most multi-tool lovers, and with the EDC craze seemingly getting bigger each year, Myers' market will only grow.
I’m a lapsed industrial designer. I was born in NYC and figured I’d die there, but a few years ago I abandoned New York to live on a farm in the countryside with my wife. We have six dogs.
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A Smart Design Entrepreneur: Justin Myers Creates Metal Sheathes for Multitools
Tried the one for the OHT a few years ago when he was selling them on Amazon since there's nowhere to mount a clip to the things and the design was so unusably awful in practice I threw it in a coffee can full of unsorted bolts and never even thought about it again until now. They might make more sense for other models but if you create a million different versions of a thing a lot of them are invariably going to be terrible. Perfect gift idea for the fasci-on-conscious Proud Boy who has everything else in his ripstop shorts, though.