A watch strap is an easy thing to take for granted, until it breaks on you. Only then do you realize that a well-made strap, while not as technically complex as the watch movement themselves, is a feat of manufacturing in its own right. There’s fitting, splitting, pressing, stitching—and that’s just a fraction of what it takes to ensure the pretty face of your watch remains fixed to your wrist. In total there are more than 30 procedures required to make a watch strap.
It’s a craft, and it’s clear that if you can master a watch strap, you can probably make any number of other leather products, too. At least that’s the bet Shinola is making with its newly-opened leather factory. The watch brand recently opened a 12,000 square-foot factory dedicated to making leather watch straps. In a couple of months it will begin cranking out small leather goods like wallets, iPad covers and keychains, as well. This factory is the newest addition to the watchmaker’s 60,000 square-foot complex in Detroit, and it’s a testament to Shinola’s well-publicized conquest to revitalize craft in America and its homebase city.
Watch straps are a small piece of the leather industry pie, but they’re a worthy mascot for the downturn in U.S. leather manufacturing. Despite much of the raw materials (read: animals and their hides) being produced here in the U.S., leather making has been on the outs in this country for decades. Today more than 88 percent of our leather goods demand is met by manufacturers outside of the U.S., and that number is projected to rise in the next couple of years.
As labor became cheaper overseas, many large-scale factories in the U.S. closed up shop or reduced their size. Today, this translates to a capacity problem. Even if there was a massive rush of craftspeople wanting to manufacture their own leather goods, they’d have a hard time finding a place that could help them do it at scale. Websites like Makers Row, a startup that partners makers with manufacturers is helping to solve that problem, but it still doesn’t account for the underlying capacity issue. To put it in perspective, today there are no leather good manufacturers who have more than 100 employees.
Shinola is hoping to change that statistic. “Part of reversing this trend is having a place to make things,” says says Jen Guarino, vice president of leather for Shinola. “And that’s what we’re doing.” Right away, Shinola hired 50 people to work in the factory, and it’s looking to expand that to around 60 employees by the end of the year. Shinola hope to manufacture up to 70,000 watch straps, with the other hundreds of thousands coming from its partner Hadley Roma, a watch strap company based in Florida.
The company brought in Braloba, a Swiss manufacturer of leather goods, to train its staff in the art of making leather straps, which is a telling sign that they had to outsource for experts.
“When you’re trying to bring back scaled production again, you’re kind of the guardian of your own trade,” explains Guarino. “You have to teach it or lose it.” Shinola then, is hoping to create a generation of leather workers through this factory, which they plan to scale up over the next couple of years. They’re currently in talks with Detroit’s College of Creative Studies (they actually share a building with the school) to create a leather curriculum to extend that teaching relationship.
Detroit in its own way is particularly well suited for this kind of work. “There’s an understanding of leather here that might surprise most people, just because cars require leather,” Guarino says. Nearly all of the employees come from around the city, and 25 of them previously worked in the auto industry doing things like sewing leather headrests, managing quality assurance and workflow engineering. Perhaps not surprisingly, there's a natural overlap of skills when you hire from a city with a history of manufacturing.
“A lot of the things I’ve been able to gain from working auto industry are very translatable,” says a production engineer at Shinola who previously worked at Toyota and General Electric. “There’s a learning curve because the size of the components and materials aren’t exactly the same she says. But there are enough similarities that you can take a lot from what people have already learned.”
Shinola has partnered with the Maker's Coalition, which offers an Industrial Sewing Certification Program. The idea is to train workers on various industrial sewing skills, whether that be for the auto industry or a fashion company. All of the employees at Shinola underwent dexterity tests to test their eye-hand coordination and how well they can spot details. “It was a lot of, If have something in my hand and I see something in front of me, how quickly can I figure out that that hole fits that one,” says Guarino. “Can you look at a drawing and instructions and from that figure out what you're supposed to do?”
There are plenty of reasons reshoring a leather factory is a smart move. Beyond bolstering a flailing industry, there’s the fact that speed to market is increased by producing goods here, as is oversight on quality. But beneath the apparent do-goodery is the fact that opening a leather factory is a strategic business play for Shinola.
Manufacturing watch movements, while a complex and technically impressive feat, has limited applications. Leather, though? That opens a vast new world of product opportunities. The handbag-making business is a $12.8 billion industry, and U.S. manufacturing has less than a $500 slice of that number. In other words, Shinola is setting itself up nicely to make a move into many other leather-centered product categories. “There are no parameters to the categories we think are viable,” says Steve Bock, Shinola’s CEO. “On that basis, leather very very quickly became an interesting and compelling category.”
Shinola already makes watches, bikes, leather goods and its own soft drink. They’re planning to introduce dog accessories later this summer, and people in the company like to joke that someday they’ll make a toaster (it’s probably not a joke). Even with its spread of products, Shinola insists its not a lifestyle brand: “We’re driven by design,” says Bock.
It’s easy to hate on the company. Its had its share of market flubs (hiring Bruce Weber to shoot your Vogue ad campaign and selling a $2,000 bike in a bankrupt city might be a little tone deaf). And despite its startup message, Shinola was founded by Tom Kartsotis, the Fossil Watch tycoon whose Bedrock Brands is based in Texas. Kartsotis has all the money and connections needed to commission bespoke manufacturing machines and start a successful watch company. It might not be a model for every small-time manufacturing hopeful, but you have to admit the company has made a sizable investment.
“We’re not going to move the needle,” says Bock. “We’re very knowledgeable about the fact that we’re a small group of people.” But, adds Guarino, “Once you hit an all time low, you only have one place to go. Someone’s gotta lead that, and I’d like to believe that we will be one of those leaders.”
