Ben Jimenez

Founder and CEO, Rounded Gear

Ben Jimenez is a co-founder and the CEO of Rounded Gear, the American KYDEX holster brand that started as Concealment Express. He founded the company in 2014 in a Jacksonville, Florida garage with two friends. Twelve years and more than 3 million holsters later, he still runs it from Jacksonville, and the holsters are still made in the company's own shop.

He has also carried concealed for more than 15 years, and he is a father. Both of those shape the product more than any spec sheet does. A holster that is uncomfortable gets left at home, and a holster that does not cover the trigger completely has no business anywhere near a house with kids in it. Those two constraints, comfort you can actually wear all day and a trigger nothing can reach, are the ones every Rounded Gear design answers to first.

Why A Manufacturer Sees Different Things

Ben is not a reviewer who borrows guns to test gear. He is the manufacturer, and he oversees the mold program directly: a library of more than 1,000 gun models. Each mold is a proprietary precision aluminum negative, designed and cut in house, and the holster is the positive formed over it. The mold is the foundation the whole product is built on.

Cut the mold correctly and the holster holds the gun with no rattle or wobble, blocks cleanly around thumb safeties, slide releases and other controls without leaving dead air, and clears the optic footprint where the gun carries one. Get the mold wrong and no amount of hardware fixes it afterward.

That means problems reach Ben early. When a holster prints badly on one body type, when a control sits somewhere awkward, when two gun models turn out to share a shell or turn out not to, it shows up in the mold shop before it shows up in a review. It shows up a second time in warranty claims, which the company honors for life and therefore reads carefully.

It is also a narrower kind of expertise than a gun writer's, and Ben says so. He writes about holsters, fitment and carry. He does not tell people which gun to buy.

What He Writes About

• Holster selection by gun model, carry position and body type
• Cross-fitment between guns that share a frame or slide profile, and the ones that only look like they do
• KYDEX as a material: stiffness, heat stability and how retention holds up over years of daily carry
• Gun model coverage, including the reliability questions owners actually ask
• Concealed carry practice, comfort and printing

His buyer's guides and gun coverage are published on the Rounded Gear blog.

How Rounded Gear Holsters Are Made

The trigger guard is fully enclosed. Not mostly, not with a gap you could work a finger into if you tried. Nothing reaches that trigger until you draw the gun, and for a house with kids in it that is not a feature, it is the entire point.

Optics get handled the same way, quietly. If your gun can wear a red dot, the holster is cut for it. If it is one of the leaner designs, the shape clears the optic without needing a cut. And if you carry a revolver, there is nothing to cut around in the first place. You never have to hunt for the optics-ready version, because there isn't one to hunt for.

Retention is Posi-Click® Retention, and the name is literal: you hear the gun seat. Tighten or loosen it with a Phillips screwdriver at your kitchen table, no proprietary tool, no sending it back.

Made start to finish in the USA. Warrantied for life, unconditionally, which is a promise that only means something if you are the one making the holster. Rounded Gear is.

Connect

Ben Jimenez on LinkedIn

Media enquiries, corrections and product questions can be sent through the Rounded Gear contact page.