This video produced by Acquire, a magazine about men's lifestyle, fashion, technology, and culture, gives us an insight on Triple Aught Design (TAD), a gear company that has produced some of the best tactical clothing and equipment that operators and outdoor folks rave about. I have been a user of TAD Gear, and Optimus Prime is a fan too. What Optimus Prime appreciates about the apparel of TAD is you can look good while in the outdoors and even in urban settings. The designs and quality of TAD products are some of the best in the business, and even the rip-offs coming from the China, which follow the fabric and stitching of the original, also tend to last much longer than the usual garment rip-offs.

Triple Aught Design was founded in 1997 by Patrick Ma, who is also the Chief Designer of the company. For those who wonder what "Triple Aught" means, it is a grade of steel wool, in which triple zeros (triple aught) denote Extra Fine Quality.

The video gets us into the workshop of Triple Aught Design, with a focus on Patrick Ma, who explains the design principles of the company. They have a compact team of designers, quality control guys, and those who handle the business side of the group. Their basic design philosophy is to design gear that they themselves would use and depend on. Patrick explains that they were also lucky that they found a willing userbase in the form of some of the elite units in the world so early on in the business --- a testament of the quality of their products. Through word of mouth from these special users did TAD get wider acceptance and even bigger business for their apparel and gear.

Patrick goes further to share where they get their design inspirations, and it's not through other clothing designs only. They go and check out some of the best industrial designs and find out what works best and incorporate these into their products.

They also have a their own retail store which they opened in November 2010. It's tastefully designed, and it looks better than your usual outdoors and tactical goods store.

Watch the video below and our thanks to Acquire for sharing this video for everyone to see. I love the Toyota Land Cruiser 40 Series 2-door Hardtop at the beginning of the video. That's a classic one.