The designs are informed by McLean’s professional background, which he simply summed up as the “consulting and contracting business,” but his network of Navy SEAL buddies and Army Ranger-like build suggest there’s more to the story. “We talk about failure modes in engineering, the way things fail,” McLean says. Through his work as a contractor, he’d “experienced structural failures in watch cases, clasps, crowns, and bezels. I won’t name names, but I had bought watches that I loved the design of, but they didn’t work with my lifestyle. They ended up as a box of parts.”