This is the new Shinola GMT World Timer, each one is built in Detroit using Swiss parts, including a Sellita SW330-2 automatic mechanical movement with 25 jewels and a 42+ hour power reserve.
The GMT movement used in this watch allows you to track multiple timezones simultaneously, and easily, thanks to the fourth watch hand and a rotating bezel showing timezones for various key world cities.
This is the new Shinola GMT World Timer, each one is built in Detroit using Swiss parts, including a Sellita SW330-2 automatic mechanical movement offering 25 jewels and a 42+ hour power reserve.
History Speedrun: Shinola Watches
Shinola was founded in 2011 by Tom Kartsotis, originally the co-founder of Fossil Watches. Kartsotis had built Fossil into a company generating $3.2 billion in annual sales on the back of moderately priced, internationally-sourced watches styled with a vintage/classic aesthetic.
His ambition with Shinola was different and far more ambitious – he wanted to create an American watch brand to bring the American watchmaking industry back at an accessible price point, and to prove that domestic watchmaking could work at scale for the first time since the late 1960s.
The Shinola name has deep roots, it originated as a shoe polish brand of the American Chemical Manufacturing and Mining Company, founded in Rochester, New York in 1877. It became a household staple through the first half of the 20th century, its popularity boosted by American GIs who spread its use across Europe during World War I.
The company ceased production around 1960. When Kartsotis and his team were debating what to call their new venture, the story goes that a heated discussion prompted someone to invoke the old wartime expression referencing the polish: “you don’t know sh*t from Shinola” – and the name was settled. Its long dormant associations with Americana made it a natural fit.
Kartsotis chose Detroit as the base for Shinola very deliberately – he wanted to build the company within a community with a long manufacturing history, and to use the brand as a vehicle for local job creation. The company’s headquarters and watch factory were set up in the historic Argonaut Building at the College for Creative Studies, a space discovered almost by accident when visiting Bedrock officials stepped off an elevator onto a vacant floor and saw its potential.
To build out the watchmaking operation, Shinola partnered with Swiss quartz movement manufacturer Ronda AG, which supplied expert trainers to develop a local workforce that had no prior watchmaking experience – many of the early hires had earlier worked in Detroit’s automotive sector.
The watch is powered by a Sellita SW330-2 automatic movement, a Swiss-made caliber known for its reliability and the practical advantage of never requiring a battery – it winds itself using the natural motion of your wrist throughout the day.
The company’s first watch, the Runwell Limited Edition, launched in March of 2013 in an edition of 2,500 pieces offered in 47mm and 40mm sizes at $550 USD apiece. The run sold out in less than a week. The Runwell remains Shinola’s flagship line and was later expanded with an automatic movement version in 2019.
In December of 2013, the Wright Brothers Limited Edition became the first entry in the ongoing Great Americans Series, which has since honoured Henry Ford, Muhammad Ali, Maya Angelou, Jackie Robinson, and others.
The Lake Erie Monster, introduced in 2017, was Shinola’s first dive watch and its first model fitted with an automatic movement. More recent additions include the Canfield Speedway automatic chronograph in 2021 and the Mechanic, a hand-wound piece launched in 2022 whose name pays tribute to Detroit’s sign-painting tradition.
Over the years, Shinola has grown into a much broader lifestyle brand, it now makes leather goods, bicycles, jewelry, audio equipment, and eyewear, and it opened an 8-storey boutique hotel on Detroit’s Woodward Avenue in 2019.
The Shinola GMT World Timer
The Shinola Monster GMT World Timer is a watch designed to make managing multiple time zones as intuitive as possible – it has a unidirectional rotating bezel engraved with city names representing the world’s major time zones, paired with an orange-tipped GMT hand that tracks a second time zone against an internal 24-hour ring.
Together, these two features allow the wearer to read local time, a second reference time zone, and – with a quick turn of the bezel – the current hour in any city on the dial, all without pulling the crown, cycling through menus, or doing any mental arithmetic.
The watch is powered by a Sellita SW330-2 automatic movement, a Swiss-made caliber known for its reliability and the practical advantage of never requiring a battery – it winds itself using the natural motion of your wrist throughout the day.
This movement drives the central hour, minute, and seconds hands alongside the independently adjustable GMT hand, and it also feeds a date display positioned at the 3 o’clock aperture. It has 25 jewels, a 42+ hour power reserve, and a frequency of 28,800 bph.
The stainless steel case measures in at 40mm, and it sits on a polished and brushed stainless steel bracelet fitted with a quick-release system and push-button removable links, meaning the wearer can adjust the fit on the fly without tools.
The GMT movement used in this watch allows you to track multiple timezones simultaneously, and easily, thanks to the fourth watch hand and the bezel showing timezones for various key world cities.
As noted higher up, each one of these is built in Detroit by American workers using many Swiss parts, offering a good balance between American manufacturing and world-famous Swiss movement quality.
The Shinola GMT World Timer is now available to buy in limited numbers on Huckberry here, and it comes with free US shipping and free US returns.
Images courtesy of Huckberry
Articles that Ben Branch has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
