It took us seven years to
get a watch case right.
I know how that sounds.

That watch case is The Puck.

Most people would be embarrassed by that timeline. We’re not. If someone told me they’d spent 7 years on a leather case that holds one watch, I’d ask what they were doing for the other 6.

It started with my grandfather. When I was 18, he passed away and left me his vintage Heuer Monaco. It was my first proper watch. It was on a steel bracelet, which doesn’t lay flat the way a strap does, so the watch rolls of the time didn’t suit it. Whenever I traveled, I wrapped it in a sock, because a sock was the softest thing I had. I did that for years.

The reason it took 7 years to replace that sock starts a long way from watches.

I grew up in a house with exactly one drill.

I was raised in Auchterarder, a town of about 4,000 people just outside Gleneagles in Scotland. Mum was a teacher. Dad was a fantastic businessman in the golf industry, but he didn’t tinker. The only thing he ever worked on was his golf swing. If you asked me for one word for my childhood, it’d be freedom.

The house had one tool, a 1970s Black & Decker drill. Nobody around me made things for a living, so I didn’t think making things was a real job. My outlet was paper and canvas, and when I got my first car, I started inventing reasons to work on it.

When it was time to choose, I was torn between art school and mechanical engineering. I was good at maths and physics, and the adults made the sensible argument: engineering was the safer road into the car and aerospace worlds I loved anyway. I was thinking about a salary.

At university I spent a week’s worth of beer money on a cheap red race seat. My buddy Pete was a much better engineer than me and actually knew CAD, so we sketched a base out of mandrel-bent exhaust tubing, turned the seat into a lounge chair and called ourselves N1 Enterprises. We sold exactly one chair, to one person. Back then, just deciding to make something and put it out into the world felt a little bit illicit.

Then came the job that taught me what good enough really costs.

My first real job was watching people break my work.

An associate of my dad’s had come out of a meeting at Oakley’s headquarters in California and seen the CEO walk out of the building in board shorts and a t-shirt. That image was all the market research I needed. I applied to Oakley 7 or 8 times before they took me.

I ended up in Advanced Product Development, working on gear for the US Special Forces, mostly eye protection. Between 60 and 70% of every project was impact testing, for shrapnel and for rocks kicked up by helicopters.

My boss, Carlos, broke about 90% of the prototypes I handed him. I’d spend months on something, hand it over, and he’d bend it and flex it until it gave. The running joke was that you always made two. The saying that came out of that place, f*ck mediocrity, is the one Discommon still runs on.

I stayed 11 years. In 2014, that turned into Discommon, and leaving was scarier than I’d expected. “Hi, I’m Neil, I work in design at Oakley” opened any door in about 4 seconds. “I’ve got a small startup called Discommon” opened a lot fewer.

I still thought that once something looked finished, the hard part was over. It took real money to cure me of that.

Then a missing letter cost me about $60,000.

Some of my earliest Discommon work was consulting for The Macallan, who paid me in 25- and 30-year-old whisky. Those bottles were $600 to $1,000 back then. A Macallan 30 is about $8,000 now, and I’ve drunk countless of them, which tells you how good I was at the commercial side.

We also made a run of hip flasks with them. On the finished flasks, the engraving read “mouthpece.” One missing letter. It had been through 5 rounds of approval, mine included, and someone at Macallan spotted it about 10 seconds after opening the first box.

We fixed every unit in 10 days and still made the launch. That letter cost me around $60,000. I’m not proud of the typo. I’m oddly proud of the 10 days.

Once Discommon could afford proper engineering, testing and tooling, I knew which problem I wanted to go back to first: the watch I’d been carrying in a sock.

Two problems took most of those 7 years.

The first was the leather. We wanted the outside formed in one piece around the whole depth of the case, in the kind of curves we usually borrow from cars. Leather is soft and it’ll take a shape, but we were asking it to change shape an awful lot without stretching, kinking or tearing. The only way to get there was to skive the Napa incredibly thin and wet-form it.

The second was the foam. The usual way to make a watch puck is a thin layer of EVA foam bent into shape. We cut steel injection molds instead and injected polyurethane foam into the exact shape we wanted. It’s the shear-thickening kind, so it absorbs energy instead of passing it on to the watch.

Cutting steel tooling is expensive, and for a company our size it’s a very large commitment. Once the steel is cut, every change costs real money. So every time the leather and the foam didn’t agree, we didn’t patch it. We went back and did it properly, and the calendar kept turning.

We stayed on it until both of them behaved.

It holds one watch, and it holds it properly.

What came out of those 7 years is The Puck.

The outside is wet-formed Napa leather. Inside is the injected polyurethane foam, with rigid corners so the case won’t collapse if you drop it, and a microfiber lining that’s softer than a baby koala’s warm embrace. It closes with a YKK zipper and our own rubberized pull.

It’s 4 inches across and 2½ inches thick, and it weighs 120 grams. It holds one watch, on a bracelet or a strap. Anything 42mm and up sits locked in the foam. A 40mm case will move a little, but it’s still protected. We call the fit “universal,” and the quote marks are doing honest work. We’ve tested the absurdly chunky, the impossibly thin, six-figure Greubels and a $25 Casio CA53W. You don’t settle on the Casio either. Protect the nerds.

Our customer Alexander put it this way:

A Puck is $115, or 3 for $270 if more than one of your watches travels, which works out to $90 each. It comes in Black and Oslo, black outside with a pale blue lining. All 19 reviews on our site are 5 stars. It has a 2-year warranty, and if it isn’t for you, send it back unused within 30 days, for any reason. You don’t have much to lose.

If you’ve got a watch that means something to you, it deserves better than a sock.

Shop The Puck

P.S. If your good watch is wrapped in a sock in your luggage right now, don’t feel bad. I did the same with my grandfather’s Monaco for years.