page_title: Shinola (retail company)
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Shinola (retail company) / History
caption_attribution_description: Photograph by afiler (from [1]) taken at Pennington County Historical Society.
context_page_description: Shinola is an American luxury goods retailer based in Detroit, Michigan. It produces watches, bicycles, and leather goods, among other products. Founded in 2011, Shinola takes its name from the defunct Shinola shoe polish company. The company was founded by Tom Kartsotis and is owned and operated by Texas-based investment group Bedrock Brands.
context_section_description: The original Shinola shoe polish brand was founded in Rochester, New York in 1877, and went out of business in 1960. The modern company was founded in 2011 by Tom Kartsotis under his investment company, Bedrock Manufacturing (now Bedrock Brands). Kartsotis, previously a founder of Fossil Group, wanted to create a high end American watch manufacturing brand to rival Swiss watchmakers at a lower price point. Bedrock decided to acquire the Shinola brand after an associate used the World War I-era expression "You don't know shit from Shinola" as a rejoinder to Kartsotis' stated ambitions for the company. Unexpectedly, the joke generated a serious discussion about restoring the Shinola brand. Market surveys established that when faced with a choice of paying US$5 for a pen from China, $10 for one made in the United States, and $15 for a pen made in Detroit, consumers would be willing to pay a premium for the last one.
  Every Shinola product is technically assembled in the United States. However, many parts used in Shinola watches are manufactured in China and Thailand. These factories are owned by companies based 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, Pennsylvania. 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 (2,800 m²) 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 finish the assembly of 500,000 watches a year.
  Most of the workers assembling watches are local Detroiters, and many of them come from the auto business. Since the company's founding in 2011, it has grown to over 400 people by 2014.
caption: A tin of original Shinola shoe polish
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