How Shinola is emphasizing its American design and manufacturing roots

“We lost that [focus on watches] for a little while,” said Kevin Wertz, CMO at Bedrock, the platform company that owns Shinola. Bedrock also owns the outerwear brand Filson. 

Shinola, founded in 2011, quickly gained a following because it was bringing manufacturing jobs back to Detroit. In 2012, the brand opened a 12,000-square-foot watch factory in the city. Over the next few years, it used its expertise in design and craftsmanship to expand into new categories. 

But in 2016, Shinola ran into a hurdle when the FTC ruled that the company could not use the tagline “Built in Detroit.” Even though Shinola has a watch factory in the U.S., its watches — like all watch brands — largely rely on imported parts. Now, Shinola’s watches say “Built in Detroit with Swiss and imported parts.”  

“We’re going back to the idea that we are designing and assembling watches in downtown Detroit,” Wertz said. 

Despite this, Shinola has found that the best way to tell its story is to do more showing, rather than telling. Wertz said the content that has performed the best for Shinola is raw photos and videos from its factories showing how its watches are made. “People say, ‘I don’t know what watches being made actually looks like,’” he said, regarding the interest.

Wertz joined the Modern Retail podcast this week to talk about how Shinola is refining its brand story. Here are a few highlights from the conversation, lightly edited for clarity and length. 

Sharpening a focus on its hero product
“We make a lot of things now at Shinola, which is incredible. We started in watches and then we made bikes and beautiful leather products, and then we launched a hotel in 2018, which is stunning. And we make board games — we make a lot of things. What we need to do now is own something in consumers’ minds, like, ‘What’s the first thing you think of when you think of Shinola?’ I think we lost that for a little while, and that thing for us is watches. We are a watch company. … If we can make beautiful timepieces by hand in Detroit, we can do anything exceptionally well. But by having that focus on watches, we have somewhere to win across the country, as opposed to competing in three very competitive categories of watches, leather and jewelry.”

How Shinola’s tagline has evolved 
“We initially had a tagline of ‘Where America is made,’ and we had a little bit of trouble with that a handful of years ago. And the challenge is that we actually are making watches by hand in downtown Detroit. Now, the regulations of what we can say and not say around that, based on the FTC, is a different story. But I think we actually gave up that story too early. And so we are now working around [the messaging of] ‘Designed and assembled in Detroit.’ We’re designing these beautiful things in Detroit. … We’re going back to the idea that we are designing and assembling watches in downtown Detroit. In the past couple of years, what we’ve ended up saying is, ‘Built in Detroit with Swiss and imported parts,’ and that level of transparency was OK.”

Telling the American manufacturing story 
“We have produced a good amount of content that shows our factory and shows the people actually making the watches and hand-sewing the leather strap on your watch, where we have tanned leather coming into Detroit and we’re cutting and sewing and staining and stitching. You can talk about that or you can show it. So we’ve been showing more of that recently, and what we’ve realized is that the more real and the more raw, the better. So most recently, we strapped a GoPro camera onto one of our workers, and it just filmed from their chest what they were doing ,… and it was one of our most highly engaged social posts. People would say, ‘I don’t know what watches being made actually looks like.’”