Excerpt:
IN SOME respects, Tom Kartsotis doesn’t take business too seriously. His company, Bedrock Manufacturing, is named for the Flintstone’s home town. Shinola, the most intriguing firm in Bedrock’s portfolio, bought its name from a long-dead brand of shoe polish best known for the insult “You can’t tell shit from Shinola”. Perfect, Mr Kartsotis believes, for a company that aims to become America’s largest manufacturer of high-quality watches—watches it is making in Detroit’s art-deco Argonaut Building, once home to General Motors’ research labs (pictured). “Someday”, claims one tongue-in-cheek Shinola advertisement, “they’ll call Geneva the Detroit of Switzerland”.
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