A gardener pulling weeds, a motorcyclist revving his engine, and a forestry worker about to process a tree have one need in common: a decent pair of gloves.
If anyone from B.C. and beyond has gardened, worked the oil rigs, or needed a decent pair of mitts over the course of the last century, odds are they have at some point owned a pair of Watsons.
The company, Watson Gloves, has been in business for 100 years, a period of time that has seen two world wars, the Great Depression, and a multitude of other global shifts and changes.
The gloves have remained constant.
“It’s great,” says Watson president and third generation employee Martin Moore about the company’s centennial celebrations.
“I’m just appreciative of all our customers and all our wonderful staff members.”
Company founder John Watson arrived in Vancouver from Oregon in 1918 looking for work as a logger. At the time, the sawmills in False Creek were in high demand filling orders to support the tail end of the war effort abroad.
But when Watson got to work he observed that the industry lacked high-quality gloves for the often grueling tasks the jobs entailed.
“False Creek at that time was all saw mills and log sorting and heavy industry,” Moore says. “He looked around and saw the gloves they were using and thought he could do better, he could make a better product for all the longshoremen and forestry workers around False Creek.”
In 1918, Watson established the Watson Glove company at Second Avenue and Main Street in Vancouver.
While business was solid, John Watson’s time at the company was short-lived.
And so entered Moore’s grandfather, W.T. ‘Dinty’ Moore, who joined the company as an office messenger boy in 1922, working his way up to copywriter and, eventually, president.
“John Watson, legend has it, was a bit of a womanizer and a gambler, and there were times he couldn’t meet payroll,” Moore explains. “My grandfather, Dinty Moore, saved every dime he ever made so some pay days John Watson couldn’t fill payroll so my grandfather would actually lend him money in exchange for shares in the company.”
That turned out to be a good business decision for Dinty, who was able to acquire majority ownership of the company when Watson died in the 1930s.
From there, things started to boom. Moore says back then the vast majority – up to 80 per cent – of their business was made up of supplying the forestry sector with gloves.
“Forestry certainly was the driving economic engine in the province, and Watson Gloves, that’s where we really got on the map,” he says.
Dinty’s son, Barrie, eventually took the reigns from his father as president after first joining the company in the late 1950s as a driver delivering gloves to dock workers.
Barrie also moved his family to West Vancouver at around this same time.
“It was just a great place to grow up and raise a family,” Martin Moore says.
The younger Moore has been working in the family business since 1986. He was appointed president in 1997.
Watson produces more the 2,500 different styles of gloves that boast such colourful names as Grease Monkey, Game of Thorns and Leather Face.
“My grandfather was really the forefront of that. He gave all our factory products recognizable names,” Moore says, adding that his father took it a step further with even more colourful names.
“We’re not selling a sexy item so we felt that we better -- Watson Gloves -- differentiate it or else you’re not going to be around.”
Today, Watson Gloves has 145 employees nationwide with three warehouses across Canada. After staying in the original factory for 89 years, the Vancouver branch was moved to a 40,000-square-foot space in Burnaby in 2007.
The company still uses the same kickpress -- a device used to help package gloves by compressing a dozen or so of them into a tight shape -- that’s been in use since the 1920s. “It works fine ... so we keep using it,” Moore says.
Michele Moore, Martin’s sister, has also been a key part of the operation at Watson, serving the company in marketing and media relations.
The family has been closely tied to the company for several generations, but Moore anticipates a bit of a change up in the coming years, noting that he’s appointing North Vancouver’s Kasey Whitman vice-president. In 2020, Moore says, Whitman will take over the presidency of Watson.
But today, Moore celebrates Watson’s last 100 years and toasts to 100 more.
“The legacy of the family and the company is important to me and my sister and both my parents,” he says. “It’s always been in our blood.”
