The one people scroll past
Every range has a colourway nobody picks first. In the GMT collection it is the Root Beer: brown and gold, sitting between a Pepsi and a Batman that both get chosen faster.
It is also the one with the most loyal owners. A surprising number of buyers come back to say it turned out to be the watch they reach for. That gap between how it sells and how it is regarded once it is on a wrist is worth explaining, because it is not an accident.
A Seiko mod is a watch built around a genuine Seiko movement, with the case, dial, hands, bezel and crystal specified rather than inherited. On a GMT that movement is a genuine Seiko NH34 automatic with a true independent GMT hand. The 24-hour hand moves on its own, without disturbing the time you are already keeping. That is the difference between a working dual-time watch and one with an extra hand painted on, and it is genuinely unusual at this price.
Where the name came from
Brown bezel, gold case furniture, warm brown dial. Somebody looked at it and said root beer, and the name stuck the way the others did.
Like every watch nickname it was never official. No manufacturer printed it on anything. It survived because it does a job the accurate description cannot. "Brown and gold two-tone 24-hour bezel with a warm brown sunburst dial" is correct and nobody says it. Root Beer is two words and everyone knows the watch you mean.
The odd part, from here, is that most Australians have never had a root beer. The name arrived with the collectors who coined it and travelled without the drink. It is also the only nickname in the range that some people quietly dislike, which has done the watch no favours. Nobody was ever talked out of a watch by the word Batman.
The other soft drink names sit on the two-tone bezels next to it. We laid out the Pepsi, the Coke and the Sprite here.
Why brown behaves differently to every other bezel
Every other GMT bezel we build is a sports watch colour. Red and blue, red and black, green and black, blue and black, all black. High contrast, cool in tone, all descended from the same idea: a functional instrument that has to be read fast.
Brown is not that. Brown and gold are warm tones, and warm tones read as dress rather than tool. Put the Root Beer next to the Pepsi and they do not look like the same watch in two finishes. They look like two different categories.
That is the whole argument for it. The GMT is the one genuinely useful complication most people will ever own, and every other version of it commits you to looking sporty. The Root Beer is the only one here that will sit under a suit cuff without the watch and the sleeve disagreeing.
The gold does the other half of that work. It picks up the warmth of the dial and softens the boundary between the two halves of the bezel, so the day and night split reads as a gradient rather than a hard line. That costs a fraction of the instant legibility the Pepsi has. It buys a watch that does not look like equipment.
Why it photographs badly
This is the honest part, and it explains most of the sales gap.
Brown is difficult under artificial light. A product photograph is lit hard and even, and hard even light is the worst possible treatment for a warm sunburst dial. The depth flattens. The gold goes yellow rather than warm. The brown goes slightly muddy, and the contrast between the two halves of the bezel drops to almost nothing on a screen.
Photograph a Pepsi in the same conditions and it survives perfectly, because saturated red and blue hold their colour under any light. That is not a statement about which watch is better. It is a statement about which watch photographs.
People buy watches from photographs. A colourway that loses most of its character in one starts every comparison from behind, and the Root Beer does. We are telling you because the alternative is you looking at an image, deciding it is dull, and never finding out otherwise.
Why it wears well
In daylight the dial does the thing photographs cannot show. It is a sunburst, so it moves. Turn your wrist and it runs from a pale bronze where the light catches it through to a deep chocolate in shadow, and it keeps doing that all day. The most alive dial in the GMT collection, and the one you cannot see in a picture.
The second thing is what brown does against skin. Cool-toned watches sit on top of a wrist. Warm ones sit with it, particularly on olive and darker skin, where a steel and blue watch can read as a separate object and a brown and gold one reads as part of the outfit. It is why so many owners describe it as comfortable, a strange word for a colour and yet the one that keeps coming up.
The third thing is that it never looks like it is trying. A Pepsi is a statement. A Root Beer is a preference. Over three years of daily wear those age very differently.
Who it suits
Buy the Root Beer if you already own a black or blue sports watch and the gap in your rotation is something dressier. It fills that gap better than anything at this price, because most dress watches have no second time zone and most GMTs are not dressy.
Buy it if you wear brown shoes, a tan belt, or anything with warmth in it. A watch that agrees with your clothes gets worn more than one that competes with them.
Buy it if you are the person who looks at the popular option and wants the other one. That instinct is right here more often than usual.
Do not buy it as your only watch if the rest of your wardrobe is black and steel. It will look correct and still feel slightly separate from everything else, and the Bruce Wayne is the better answer for that person. Do not buy it if you need maximum bezel legibility in the dark, because the warm tones give up some contrast and the Pepsi is better at that specific job.
And do not buy it from a photograph alone, ours included. That applies in both directions.
What is inside
Genuine Seiko NH34 automatic with a true independent GMT hand: self winding, hand windable, and it hacks so you can set it to the second. 40 mm 316L stainless steel case. Sapphire crystal, which resists the scratches ordinary glass picks up. 1 year warranty, handled in Australia.
50 m (5 ATM), which covers rain and hand washing. It is not a swimming watch and we are not going to imply it is. Here is what that rating actually means.
A$399, the same as every other colourway in the range. Built to order in about 2 to 3 weeks, then shipped free worldwide.
It is a homage, not a copy. No other brand's name on the dial. The distinction matters. If the warm two-tone look drew you rather than the second time zone, the Datejust family runs the same idea on a dress case. The wider case for a dual-time watch is worth reading either way.
Made to be looked at twice.
See the GMT (Rootbeer) · Browse the whole GMT range · Read the Pepsi, Coke and Sprite guide · See the GMT (Batman)
Sources
Primary references for the technical and regulatory claims above.
- Time Module NH34 calibre listing - the independently adjustable GMT hand specification.
- Time Module (Seiko Instruments) NH-series product line-up - manufacturer specifications for the NH-series calibres.