Setting up as a serious competitor to Garmin in the GPS sports watch sphere is no easy feat but Lewis Allison, the CEO behind UNA Watch, the world’s first fully modular and repairable GPS sports watch has both the grit and experience to make it happen. In this interview he talks sustainability, sport and sucking at golf…
I started out in golf watches.
Prior to founding UNA I was the CTO at a company called Shot Scope, who build golf watches. 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.”
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 smartwatch. Apple has such a stronghold on thatmarket, 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.
Our watch is sustainable.
It has long battery life, highly accurate GPS, continuous heart-rate monitoring and SpO2 monitoring, but the key thing is that all of these components are both replaceable and upgradable…and it’s very easy to do so.We’ve got a daylight-readable MiP display – again that’s a replaceable part. The battery is replaceable, and that means it’s not soldered down, it’s not glued in – users can handle it. If you imagine the old Nokia phones with batteries you could slide in, it’s like that. The other key thing that shouldn’t be unique, but is to us, is that it’s got a standard USB-C charging cable.
I’ve always been quite sporty as well as techy.
It’s not a unique combination, but often you’re either a complete nerd or you’re quite sporty – and I’m a little bit of both. I’ve got a memory of when I was 15 in school: I won a really geeky competition to visit NASA at Houston, as part of Scottish Space School. Twenty pupils from the whole of Scotland got to go to NASA and spend a week there. At the same time I was playing football, and I remember walking into the changing room the Saturday after the trip and the local newspaper had printed a big spread saying “Lewis wants to be an astronaut”. You can imagine the reception I got… I’ve always combined sports with tech, so doing this now as a combination of both, I’m really enjoying it.
The only problem was, the exact day we launched, Trump announced the Liberation Day tariffs.
We were really happy with our day-one results and the pre-campaign marketing, but were a little disappointed just due to the US buyer confidence going down a little bit. The tariffs haven’tactually affected us in the end, though that changes on a daily basis.
I’m a techy CEO.
I’m a technical founder – that’s the thing that’s interesting for me and challenging – I just want to get into the technical stuff all the time. But now I’m a CEO as well, I’ve also got to get into the commercial side.
We want this to be the most developer-friendly watch possible.
When we first launched our Kickstarter, we offered a £30 tool that allows developers to get extra debug information out of the watch to create applications for it. We thought maybe a handful of people would buy it, but 20% of the backers did, which suggests we’ve got a really strong developer community.
I’ve got two kids and another on the way.
I used to be into mountain biking, but the honest truth is I don’t have time to go and do a 4hr expedition any more. But I do like to get out for an hour or two, so I’m more into gravel biking now. We have the Pentland Hills right behind us, so I get out there. I like my running too – I’ve done a half marathon and a 10k this year. I also coach my six-year-old’s football team.
For more info on UNA Watch visit unawatch.com
