I recently found these "Gold Tip" pliers at a thrift store. Since they were made of plastic, I thought at first that they might be for electrical work, but in any event I figured it would be handy to have plastic pliers when handling items that could be damaged by steel ones.
It turns out that they're actually for holding and cutting glass. Fletcher is actually Fletcher-Terry, a company I had discussed in a previous post on glass cutters. Fletcher-Terry dates back to 1868 when Samuel Monce invented is "Gold Tip glass cutter." The company concentrated on hand-held glass cutting tools until 1980 when two of its largest distributors introduced their own lines of automatic glass cutters. The German-made ones sold for half the price of Fletcher-Terry's hand held ones. So, Fletcher-Terry tried to enter the automated glass cutter market. Profits dropped drastically, so the decision was reversed two years later. In addition, the company expanded into mat-cutting tools. By 1994, it was employing about 125 people and enjoying annual sales of $14 million. A decade later things began to slide again, and 2009 the company filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy protection. In 2012, it became part of the Fletcher Business Group out of East Berlin, Connecticut. From what I've read online, many of their products are now made in China. C'est la vie.
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