News · Lima Watch

Lima borrows Braun's button colours for a 37.5 mm GMT with no applied markers at all

The GMT Transit "The Palette" puts three flat discs of colour on a white dial, runs a Seiko NH34 and costs US$350, with no lume anywhere.

Hen & Mills Editorial · 4 min read · 16 August 2026

• Lima has added The Palette to its GMT Transit line, taking its three dial colours from the switch and button colours Braun used on household appliances.
• The 37.5 mm steel case carries a flat white dial with no applied markers, a printed 24-hour scale and an open red triangle GMT hand, with no lume at all.
• It is US$350 direct from Lima with a twelve month warranty, currently listed as sold out, and no separate Australian price is published.

Three dots of colour, and nothing else applied to the dial

Design homages in watchmaking almost always go one of two ways. Either the brand copies a shape and hopes nobody says the word "tribute" out loud, or it takes a name off a famous designer and applies it to something that would have looked the same anyway. What is rarer, and much harder, is taking a design philosophy seriously enough to leave things off. Lima has had a go at that with the newest version of its GMT Transit, called The Palette, and the reference point is Dieter Rams' work at Braun.

The dial is where the argument is made. It is a flat white field with no applied markers at all: three flat discs of colour sit where nine, twelve and three would be, in orange, a warm pink-red and a dull olive, and everything else on the surface is printed. Those colours are the specific point of the exercise, because Lima has taken them from the switch and button colours Braun used across its household appliances, which is where anyone over about forty has met them before, on a radio or an alarm clock or a food processor in a kitchen they grew up in.

Around the outside runs a 24 hour scale printed in fine black and blue, and the fourth hand reading against it is an open red triangle rather than a filled arrow, which keeps it from smothering anything underneath. Hours and minutes are dark green batons, an odd choice on paper and the right one in practice, because black hands over a white dial with three coloured dots would have made the whole thing a diagram. The date sits at six, and the only text is "GMT TRANSIT" at the top and the maker's name in a small lower-case script.

What the specification will and will not give you

The case is 316L stainless steel at 37.5 mm across, 45.6 mm from lug to lug, and 10 mm thick, or 12 mm counted to the top of the crystal. On paper that is close to ideal for a design-led everyday watch, and the flat brushed surfaces with a fixed bezel and squared-off lugs are doing a very Braun thing: no polish anywhere for the light to bounce off, so the dial stays the loudest object. The strap is dark grey Italian Alcantara on a 20 mm lug width.

Then the parts that will decide it for people. There is no lume. Not a little, none at all, which on a watch with a GMT hand means the second time zone is a daylight function and nothing else. Water resistance is 5 ATM, so rain and a sink but not a swim. And the crystal is double domed K1 mineral rather than sapphire.

I have argued myself into and out of that last one twice. K1 at this price is defensible, and a domed mineral crystal has an optical warmth that sapphire never quite gets. But a watch built entirely around a flat, clean dial is a watch you will be looking straight into every day, and it is exactly the sort of watch where a scratch across the middle of the crystal will ruin the effect. I would have paid more for sapphire. I suspect Lima considered it and decided the price mattered more, and at US$350 I understand the reasoning even while I disagree with it.

The movement is the sensible part

Inside is the Seiko NH34, the automatic GMT that has quietly become the standard fitting for microbrand travel watches, with a 24 hour fourth hand driven off the same train rather than an independently jumping local hour. That distinction matters: this is a caller GMT, so you set the fourth hand for home and read your second zone against the 24 hour scale, rather than jumping the main hour hand on landing. For most people, who track a time zone rather than fly into one every week, that is the right way round and considerably cheaper.

The rest of the Transit range gives you a sense of what Lima is doing here. There is a black, a grey, an ivory, a teal, a tuxedo and a reversed tuxedo, all sober, all built on the same case. The Palette is the one that breaks ranks, and it does it by being the only version whose dial you could describe to somebody over the phone.

What I like most about this watch is what it does not do. There is no story about a founder's grandfather, no fake vintage patina on the lume that does not exist, no bezel insert pretending the thing could go diving. It is a clean white dial, three colours borrowed honestly and credited, and a case designed to stay out of the way. Rams' actual advice was that good design is as little design as possible, and while a lot of watches have quoted him, this is one of the few that appears to have read past the first clause.

Lima GMT Transit The Palette pricing and availability

The GMT Transit The Palette is sold directly by Lima at US$350, with a twelve month warranty, and is currently listed as sold out on the brand's own store. Lima does not publish a separate Australian price, so buyers here pay in US dollars, and the brand notes that destination country customs duty and GST are not included in that figure. International delivery is quoted at five to fourteen days depending on the country. Whether The Palette returns as a repeat run or stays a one-off, Lima has not said.