Proudly Canadian

Redwood is, and always has been, a small independent watch manufacturer. This means we do not have large corporate backers pushing for profits above all else. We report to no one but our own team and our customers.

When we launched our first watches in 2015, we had the ambitious goal to bring manufacturing back home eventually. Today, although we do not have the capability to make all the parts of our watches here in Canada yet, we are proud to report that we have moved the assembly line fully in-house.

This gives us a much better control over the entire manufacturing process and our team is much closer to the final product.

There is currently no company in Canada (or the USA for that matter) that fully makes watches at home.

The reason for that is that the company would have to make every single component or find a Canadian supplier able to make the component in Canada. There simply isn’t the expertise and manufacturing capability to do this at scale right now.

The biggest difficulty is making the movement. These are quite complex and require scale to be commercially feasible. We source our movements from a Japanese company called Miyota (connected to Citizen). They produce millions of movements, have been doing so for decades and supply a huge number of watch brands.

A lot of the specific components that we use are made in Asia (China, Hong Kong, Malaysia). We have reliable manufacturing partners that work with us to manufacture our cases, dials, hands as per our specifications. We supply them with the design, specifications for material, tolerances, etc. and they are able to make the parts quickly, reliably and to our quality standards. The infrastructure they have developed and the experience the have acquired is phenomenal. 

The leather for our straps is sourced in Europe and where there is a huge leather industry.

The assembly used to happen in China. Our Kickstarter watches were made this way. But our goal from day one was to bring manufacturing back home. We actually mention it in our Kickstarter campaign from way back in 2015 (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1503170848/redwood-watches-for-exploring-the-world)

Later 2020 was the first time we started assembling watches here in Canada. We received all the components from overseas and got to work in our small shop. The process is much longer but much more satisfying. It gives us an intimate knowledge of the manufacturing process and a deep connection to the product we make. It also allows us to apply our own quality control standards. We’ve made a number of improvements to the watch since (better lume, drilled lugs, etc.).

The Redwood Brothers