Shinola
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| Private | |
| Industry | Lifestyle brand |
| Founded | 2011 in Detroit, Michigan, United States |
| Founder | Tom Kartsotis |
| Headquarters | Cass Corridor, Detroit, Michigan, United States |
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Key people
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Tom Kartsotis, Steve Bock |
| Website | www |
Shinola LLC is an American luxury lifestyle brand which specializes in watches, bicycles, and leather goods among other items. Founded in 2011, its name is a nod to the former Shinola shoe polish company that operated in the early- and mid-20th century. The current company is owned and operated by Bedrock Brands, a privately owned Texas investment group, and was launched by Tom Kartsotis, one of the founders of the Fossil Group retail conglomerate.
The original Shinola shoe polish brand was founded in Rochester New York in 1877, and went out of business in 1960. In 2001, the name Shinola was acquired by Bedrock Manufacturing, a venture capital firm based in Dallas, Texas (later rechristened as Bedrock Brands). Kartsotis wanted to create an American watch-manufacturing brand to rival Swiss-makers at a lower price point. The management at Bedrock Manufacturing chose the name "Shinola" when a Kartsotis associate used the World War II era colloquialism, "You don't know shit from Shinola," as a rejoinder to Kartsotis' stated ambition of building a great company. Unexpectedly, the joke generated a serious discussion about restoring the Shinola brand. Market surveys established that consumers—when faced with a choice of paying $5 for a pen from China, $10 for one made in the United States, and $15 for a pen made in Detroit—would be willing to pay a premium for the last one.
Today, every Shinola product is, technically speaking, made in the United States. However, many parts used in Shinola watches are manufactured in Switzerland. At the time of the company's founding in 2011, no American watchmaker had produced watches at scale since the late 1960s, with U.S.-based watchmaking relegated to select specialty companies such as RGM in Lancaster, PA. Shinola's current tagline is "Where American is Made," and the company has actively utilized Detroit's reputation as a worldwide manufacturing hub in its marketing of the brand.
The company's headquarters and watch factory are housed within the College for Creative Studies (CCS) on the fifth floor of the Alfred A. Taubman Building in Detroit, a former automotive research lab. Shinola's occupation of the CCS space at first occurred by accident when Bedrock officials, seeking a manufacturing site after resolving to rebuild Shinola, visited the College and the elevator unexpectedly opened on the fifth floor, which was vacant at the time. They decided to transform the 30,000 square feet of vacant space into their watch factory and company headquarters. To build out the watch factory, the company partnered with Ronda, which also brought in expert watchmaking veterans to train Shinola's watch assemblers, all of whom had no prior experience in watchmaking. Currently, the factory has the capacity to produce 500,000 watches a year.
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Wikipedia