Stanley: How One Company Quietly Bought Almost Every Name on This List

Stanley Black & Decker didn't build most of the names on your garage shelf, it bought them. This documentary traces how one Connecticut hardware company, founded by Frederick T. Stanley in 1843 on a promise of consistency and trust, spent the next two centuries quietly acquiring nearly every brand a builder, mechanic, or homeowner reaches for without thinking twice. We start with the "merger" that wasn't one: the 2010 combination of Stanley Works and Black & Decker into an $8.4 billion company where Stanley controlled the board from day one. Then we go back further, to the acquisitions that set the pattern decades earlier — Black & Decker buying DeWalt in 1960, absorbing Kwikset and Price Pfister through the Emhart deal in 1989 — before tracing how Stanley pulled in Irwin, Lenox, Craftsman, Cub Cadet, Troy-Bilt, and more, one deal at a time.