Kraft Tool Co. still carries the name of the partner Ron Meyer lost in 1990
Two tool-company veterans started a hand-tool maker in 1981. One died nine years later, and the other kept his name on it and made it a family business.
Shawnee, KS
Ron Meyer’s company is named for somebody else. Si Kraft was his partner when the two men started Kraft Tool Co. in September 1981. Kraft died in 1990, nine years into the business, and Meyer took it on himself. The name stayed.
“It brings a little tear,” Meyer said of his partner in a sponsored feature that INTRUST Bank ran in the Kansas City Business Journal in 2024. “It was just a heck of a lot of fun with him.”
The company Meyer kept going makes the hand tools that concrete finishers, masons, drywall hangers and tile setters carry onto job sites. It is based in Shawnee, Kan., and it owns a line of masonry tools whose history runs back to 1798. Kraft Tool is a family business. Meyer took it on alone after Kraft’s death, and his son, Ryan, joined in 2014. The company the two men started grew out of a pair of complaints: the tools weren’t good enough, and they took too long to arrive.
Before Kraft Tool, Meyer and Kraft worked together at another tool company. Meyer was national sales manager. Kraft was director of marketing. Neither liked how that business operated. Lead times were long, and the product quality didn’t meet their standards, according to the 2024 feature.
So they started their own. “When you’re working for another company, you do things like they want you to do,” Meyer said in the Kansas City Business Journal feature. “And we decided that, when we started Kraft Tool, we were going to do it our way.”
Their way was easy to state. “Back then, we wanted to come out and produce a quality tool at a decent, fair price. And we service the heck out of you,” he said in the same Business Journal piece.
The early operation fit in a 10,000-square-foot building. The partners also made a point of not promising more than they could deliver. Overpromising, Meyer said, is the worst thing you can do. “A customer asks you to do something, and you say, ‘Oh, I’m going to do it,’ and then you find out you can’t,” he said in the Business Journal feature.
A tradesperson paging through the Kraft Tool catalog finds the tools of flatwork and masonry sorted down to fine distinctions. Finishing trowels come in carbon steel, blue steel and a golden stainless version, some with cork handles. There are pool trowels, and Fresno trowels on tilting brackets. Edgers come in #16 and #18 gauge stainless steel. Groovers come in bronze and stainless, both as hand tools and as walking tools. Finishing brooms carry horsehair bristles or poly. Bull floats come in magnesium and wood. There are date stamps, too, for pressing a name and year into fresh concrete.
The catalog reaches past concrete into the neighboring trades: drywall, plaster, EIFS, asphalt, flooring and tile, along with levels and mason’s line. Across the top of the company’s site runs a short line: “Manufacturing since 1981.”
Some of that range came by acquisition. In 2001, Kraft Tool bought W. Rose Inc. of Sharon Hill, Pa., a brick-trowel maker that Rental Equipment Register reported had a 203-year manufacturing history. The trade magazine reported that manufacturing would continue at the Sharon Hill plant and report to Meyer, then the company’s president. The purchase gave a company founded in 1981 a brand dating to 1798.
Other names joined over the years. By 2023, the brands under the Kraft banner included Sands Level & Tool Co., a maker of professional levels, and Superior Tile Cutter Inc., along with W. Rose.
The hardest stretch came with the 2008 recession. Kraft Tool’s business fell sharply, and Meyer did something he had never done before.
“It’s the only time I’ve ever laid off any people,” he said in the Kansas City Business Journal feature. “It was the hardest thing I’d ever done. Our volume went in half, and at that time it was tough.”
By that account, it took the company a couple of years to recover, and it had grown every year since.
Ryan Meyer joined the business in 2014, though he had been around it far longer. “He grew up in this business, so he’s very familiar with it,” Ron Meyer said in the Business Journal piece.
The son described what he took from watching his father. “My dad, he’s a hard worker,” Ryan Meyer said in the same Business Journal feature. “He sacrificed a lot to build this company. He would outwork anybody. So it was kind of instilled in me and still sticks to me to this day.”
He puts stock in long relationships. “We are very loyal,” he said.
The building kept getting bigger. In 2021, Kraft Tool proposed expanding its manufacturing and distribution operation near its existing Shawnee location, a project the company said would create more than two dozen jobs, the Kansas City Business Journal reported.
By 2024, the company that began in 10,000 square feet had a 225,000-square-foot manufacturing and distribution facility and sold its tools in all 50 states and 63 foreign countries. It was in the middle of adding another 75,000 square feet.
Meyer did not take the credit for himself. “Over the years, I can say we’ve had a lot of good people,” he said in the Business Journal feature. “And you never get to where Kraft Tool is today without a lot of people helping you along the way.”