Shaped Up, Shipped Out

J&L's downfall started shortly after Kennametal spun off the unit in 1997 as a public entity, much like similar industrial marketers were doing at the time, on a specialty retail/catalog platform. And to build up some mass, J&L used the proceeds of the initial public offering to buy some companies, each of which had varying business models. "There was never really a cohesive strategy to make it all work together," recalls J&L's vice president of marketing and strategy, Chuck Moyer, who joined the company in 2001.