Leatherman Tread is a utility wearable that fits a toolbox on your wrist

By Jason Hahn Published January 25, 2015

There’s a new type of wearble in town, and it takes on-demand functionality to a whole new level: Think bracelet meets toolbox. Leatherman Tool Group, the company behind the famed Leatherman multi-tools, is set to debut its first wearable multi-tool in the form of a bracelet that fits 25 tools around your wrist. The company will also release a fancier variation that adds a watch face to the wearable toolbox.

The Leatherman Tread, set to debut this summer, is made of corrosion-resistant links, each comprising two or three functional tools. Among the 25 total usable features embedded into the links are a box wrench, cutting hooks, screwdrivers, and a carbide glass breaker. The clasp for the wrist-bound multi-tool is a bottle opener and No. 2 square drive. The links of the Tread can be rearranged and replaced.

Recommended Videos

Those who want to add even more functionality and a little style to the bike chain-style Tread may want to wait an additional season until the Leatherman Tread QM1 is available in the fall. The QM1 is like the regular Tread except it adds a Swiss-made, scratch-resistant watch face to the wearable multi-tool.

The idea for the Tread came from Leatherman president Ben Rivera being stopped at the entrance gate to Disneyland because he was carrying a Leatherman Skeletool. “I knew there had to be another way to carry my tools with me that would be accepted by security,” he says. So he wore a bike chain bracelet to see how it would feel and got the help of the company’s engineers to realize the Tread.

“I began wearing prototypes myself to test comfort and usability, and to ask for feedback,” Rivera said. “Folks immediately associated the bracelet design with a watch and asked, where’s the watch? We decided to make a timepiece an optional part of the Tread.”

The Leatherman Tread will come in two versions: stainless steel ($150) and black diamond-like carbon finish ($200). The Leatherman Tread QM1 will come also come in stainless steel ($500) and black diamond-like carbon finish ($600).

The comments section of the blog post announcing the Tread contains additional information courtesy of marketing assistant Julie Knapp: Rivera and Leatherman engineers haven’t had any issues with the Tread catching on arm hair or pinching skin, and the bracelet is TSA-compliant.

Topics

Wearables

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Jason Hahn is a part-time freelance writer based in New Jersey. He earned his master's degree in journalism at Northwestern…

Wearables

Your wearables can soon help contact trace coronavirus outbreaks

coronavirus render stylized image

Wearable devices connected to Bluetooth will soon be apart of an exposure notification system (ENS) and notify users if they have been exposed to someone who later tests positive for the coronavirus, according to the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG).

News

Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards

Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

News

Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards

Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.