Shinola Detroit

Shinola was founded in 2011 in Detroit by Tom Kartsotis, already founder of the Fossil group, who develops it through his own investment company Bedrock Manufacturing. The name is a deliberately provocative revival: "Shinola" was the brand of an American shoe polish founded in Rochester (New York) in 1877 and discontinued in 1960, made famous by the period saying "you don't know shit from Shinola". Kartsotis and his collaborators acquired the rights to the name to build, from scratch, a lifestyle brand that would tell the story of Detroit's industrial revival, a city then still marked by the crisis of the automotive industry.

Watch production is based on the fourth and fifth floors of the Alfred A. Taubman Building, at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit (previously the offices were in the centrally located Argonaut Building), where Shinola describes having opened the first major watch factory to open in the United States in nearly fifty years. Here the watches are assembled and tested by hand by local staff, originally trained in part thanks to a partnership with the Swiss movement manufacturer Ronda; the components — cases, dials and especially the movements — largely come from abroad (Switzerland, but also China and Thailand according to sources), while final assembly, regulation and quality control take place in Detroit.

This distinction between "designed and assembled in Detroit" and "entirely made in America" even ended up before the US Federal Trade Commission: in June 2016 the authority ruled that some of the brand's advertising claims, such as the slogan "Where American is Made" and the simple wording "Built in Detroit" on the dial, overstated the actually American share of production, given that 100% of the materials in some watches turned out to be imported. Shinola thus modified its wording, adding under "Detroit" the clarification "Swiss and Imported Parts" — the formula that now appears on most of the brand's dials. Over time the company, still owned by Bedrock, has expanded its catalogue to leather goods (with Horween leather from Chicago), jewelry, audio, bicycles (line suspended in early 2025) and a boutique hotel in downtown Detroit, while remaining first and foremost a watch brand by identity and volume.