Sears, a hardware buyer and the Marion-Craftsman name.

Craftsman began as a store brand. According to English Wikipedia, citing the tool-history site Alloy Artifacts, the Craftsman trademark was registered by Sears on 20 May 1927. Wikipedia says Arthur Barrows, then head of the company’s hardware department, liked the name Craftsman and reportedly bought the rights to use it from the Marion-Craftsman Tool Company, an account it attributes to Sears’s own archive pages.

The tools were sold through the Sears catalogue and in Sears retail stores from that first year. English Wikipedia says the brand’s early customers were mostly farmers, and that Barrows’s successor, Tom Dunlap, upgraded the tools and added chrome plating to them as America moved into the automobile age. The car turned a farm-and-household tool line into one aimed increasingly at people working on engines.

Sears was a retailer, not a toolmaker, and that shaped the brand from the beginning. English Wikipedia says Craftsman products were made under contract by other companies to Sears designs and specifications, with the Craftsman name applied afterwards. Some Craftsman items, it says, carried exclusive features, while others were close to models sold under other names. Sears did hold stakes in some of its suppliers; Wikipedia gives the example of a joint venture with Western Forge set up in 1965.

The hand tools at the core of the brand came from a series of makers. English Wikipedia names New Britain, Moore Drop Forging and Stanley among them, and describes Easco Hand Tools, the business that grew out of Moore Drop Forging, as the main supplier of mechanics’ tools for Craftsman. The New York Times reported on 21 February 1990 that Danaher had acquired Easco Hand Tools, taking that supply relationship into the Danaher group.

Wikipedia also says Sears offered a lifetime warranty on most Craftsman hand tools from 1927, and describes the warranty as one that did not require a receipt. For decades, that promise was part of what the Craftsman name stood for in Sears stores.

Kmart, Ace and a new owner.

Sears built a whole system around the name. English Wikipedia says the store’s tool line followed a good–better–best structure, and that the older Sears-branded tools were replaced by a Companion line in the late 1980s, which was itself replaced by Evolv in 2008, aimed at homeowners and do-it-yourselfers. From 1991, according to Wikipedia, Sears ran a Craftsman Club loyalty programme for the brand’s customers.

Craftsman also moved beyond Sears stores while Sears still owned it. USA Today, carrying an Associated Press report on 14 September 2006, said Sears would sell Craftsman tools at all Kmart stores, and MarketWatch reported on 20 February 2010 that Sears had agreed to sell Craftsman tools at Ace Hardware.

The brand changed hands in 2017. The New York Times reported on 5 January 2017 that Sears had agreed to sell Craftsman to Stanley Black & Decker, and English Wikipedia says the deal closed on 9 March 2017. Under the agreement, Wikipedia says, Sears kept a licence to sell Craftsman products for a period after the sale. On 6 March 2019, as CNBC reported the next day, Stanley Black & Decker sued Sears over its use of the Craftsman brand under that licence.

Stanley Black & Decker’s ownership brought new manufacturing plans. The Dallas Morning News reported on 15 May 2019 that the company was bringing a new plant to north Fort Worth, Texas, and English Wikipedia describes that plant as intended to make Craftsman tools in the United States. Wikipedia adds that Craftsman storage has typically been made by Waterloo Industries, a business it says Stanley Black & Decker also acquired.

The brand now sits in a portfolio alongside names such as DeWalt and Proto, under an owner that also makes tools rather than simply selling them. That is a different arrangement from the one Craftsman lived under at Sears, where the name was always made by someone else.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are all names stamped on mechanics’ and hardware-store tools: wrenches, ratchets, sockets, screwdrivers and the chests that hold them. Tool brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from companies that sell from a van parked outside a garage to names that belong to a retailer and appear only on its own shelves, and a single name can be sold to professionals and home workshops at the same time.

A tool brand’s identity is usually carried less by one product than by a name forged or stamped into steel, a colour on a toolbox, a logo on a truck and the look of a catalogue. The company behind that name may have been sold, merged or renamed, and the place where the tools are made may have moved more than once. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its tools are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its tools are made and how its marks have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Truck series, chests and sockets.

Motorsport has carried the Craftsman name for long stretches. ESPN reported on 23 October 2008 that Craftsman would be replaced by Camping World as sponsor of NASCAR’s truck series after the 2008 season; English Wikipedia says the brand had been the series sponsor since its start in 1995, when it was the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series. In 2016, Wikipedia says, Craftsman became the title name of the World of Outlaws sprint car and late model series.

Under its new owner the brand went back to trucks. CBS Sports reported that Craftsman would return as title sponsor of NASCAR’s Truck Series starting in 2023, after Stanley Black & Decker acquired the rights. The Craftsman name was once again attached to a national truck-racing series.

The brand’s visual life has been bound up with the places it was sold. For most of its history Craftsman was sold through the Sears catalogue and Sears stores, and later through Kmart, Ace Hardware and other retailers. English Wikipedia’s gallery shows Craftsman ratchets, combination wrenches and a Craftsman tool chest, the objects on which the name has been stamped and printed.

The story also shows how a retailer’s label can become a brand in its own right. Craftsman began as a name bought by a hardware buyer, was filled by a changing list of contract makers, and was eventually sold as a standalone asset to a toolmaker.

For a design guide, Craftsman shows how a house name, applied consistently across catalogues, store aisles, tool chests and race liveries, can outlast the store that created it. Compare DeWalt, a sibling brand under Stanley Black & Decker, and Proto, another Stanley Black & Decker tool name. For this guide we use a strong red, a chrome grey and a near-black with a heavy sans-serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Craftsman’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.