Lewis Allison: THE CEO BEHIND THE MODULAR AND REPAIRABLE UNA GPS WATCH ON BEING CRAP AT GOLF, TAKING $1 DEPOSITS AND FINDING TIME FOR FITNESS

I started out in golf watches. Prior to founding UNA I was the CTO at a company called Shot Scope, who build golf watches.

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I really like building consumer products that you can see someone use. The problem was, I was absolutely terrible at golf! All my mates who are golfers were using our products — it was good fun, but I really wanted to get into something different...

As an electronics engineer with 15 years' experience, I had no chance of fixing my wife's Apple Watch.

At around about the same time, when I was thinking of doing my own thing, my wife got a new Apple Watch and she scratched the screen, literally on day two of wearing it. I had all the equipment and she said: “Lewis, can you fix this for me?” I said: “Look, when it comes to Apple and Garmin products you just can't fix them — they're not designed to be fixed, they're designed to be sent back to the manufacturer.” I understand that it's to do with waterproofing and the size of the components, but it struck a chord with me: What if we could do something that would allow users to fix their own?

We're focused on running.

Running is going through a massive boom phase, so we wanted to create our first product as a sports/running watch, as opposed to a general smart watch. Apple has such a stronghold on that market, but we think we can offer a serious competitor to Garmin as a GPS sports watch-offering a watch that has 10-day battery life. I'm not saying that's better than Garmin; the difference is, ours is modular and repairable.