Jon Moy:

To paint this Rockwellian picture Shinola has spared no expense. They brought in Sky Yaeger, the designer of Bianchi's Pista model, among others, to design their bikes. They spent $14.5 million on their NYC TriBeCa flagship. (I wonder how much they invested in the real estate they occupy in Detroit? The details of the company's agreement to lease 30,000 square feet in the old GM Argonaut building have not been released.) They have filled out their retail stores with products from HICKOREE'S, Steven Alan, Archival Clothing and Common Projects. They even hired Bruce Weber for an ad campaign. Instead of starting in his parent’s garage, Shinola is a trust fund kid that decided one day he wanted to start a company and had his dad buy him all the cool stuff. And much to my chagrin, all this money seems to paying off. Shinola's roster of stockists is impressive. Their initial offering of watches sold out before they were even assembled.

Andrew Kim's beautiful Minimally Minimal blog reviewed the Shinola Runwell timepiece back in January. I thought the watch was gorgeous. It spawned weeks of timepiece research whereby I found a nostalgic watch that will be my future heirloom. Spoiler alert: the watch is not a Shinola.

It's ironic that this fascinating article about Shinola's "white-knightism" comes out at this point in my research. Boy am I glad I didn't hit the purchase button back in January.

I was certainly tempted.

(Via Om Malik)