Byrne Watches: The Upscale Indie Brand with Dynamic Hour Markers

It can take years for upstart luxury watch brands to find a coherent overarching aesthetic for their catalog. But Byrne Watches, founded in 2022, found a distinctive style right out of the gate, and they’ve been leaning heavily into it ever since. The defining unifying feature of all Byrne watches is the Gyro Dial: each 12-3-6-9 hour marker is a rectangular prism that rotates on its axis, thus giving every Byrne watch four unique looks that it cycles through. We’ll cover everything you need to know about Byrne watches.

Master watchmaker John Byrne, renowned for his work as a top restorer at Vacheron Constantin, co-founded Byrne watches along with his wife, Claire Cohen Byrne. Claire, the president of the company, is an expert in luxury retail and a professor at the Institut Français de la Mode (IFM). The brand first made a splash at GPHG 2022 with their “Legend 23” model, which laid the groundwork for the brand’s signature look. The cuboid hour markers, as on later production Byrne watches, turn over to a new style every 24 hours at 12 o’clock. The style can also be changed manually via the crown.

Design

Byrne watches all have titanium or rose gold cases, either 38mm or 41.7mm in diameter. And, aside from the unique Byrne Star worldtimer watch (I’ll get to that below), they all have a certain swoopy modernized cushion case shape. Byrne applies rhodium plating (sometimes more than one layer) to achieve various dial colors. While you might expect to see a “B” on the crown, the brand opts for the number “1” instead.

Byrne uses pencil hands exclusively, and they never bother with a seconds hand nor a date. Every Byrne comes on a strap made by Jean Rousseau, a renowned artisanal French strap maker. Most are textured rubber straps that mimic fabric. Classic tang buckles are the norm for Byrne, but deployant clasps are available on some models.

Broadly, Byrne watches come in two dial styles: brushed, or open (with a visible mainplate). Let’s talk about the brushed ones first.

Byrne Watches with Brushed Dials

Byrne’s “standard” watch is the Gyro Dial 311 with a brushed black dial. When it has a brushed blue dial, Byrne calls it the “Gyro Dial 311 Serie Sport.” Appropriately, one of the four cuboid typefaces found on the Serie Sport is that of a sports jersey.

There are also “Casino” versions of both colors with casino-themed cuboid markings (namely lucky 7’s and card suits).

Plus, a limited green “Indo-Arabe” version was made exclusively for Chronopassion while a tan “Arqaam” edition was made for 10Ten Labs in Saudi Arabia. All of these watches are 41.7mm wide and over 14mm thick, with cases made from grade 5 titanium. Byrne does manage to differentiate somewhat by playing with different combinations of brushed, polished and sandblasted surfaces.

Byrne Watches with Open Dials

At a glance, a Byrne watch with an open dial might look like an $800 Bulova. But a closer look reveals that it’s far more impressive than that. The sandblasted rhodium-plated visible mainplate is quite striking. The Byrne Gyro Dial Zero, released in 2023, was the first such example. It was offered with either a silver- or slate-colored mainplate, and the green “Golf Limited Edition” came a year later.

Byrne also offers the slate mainplate color in a rose gold case, with or without diamonds on the cuboids. Those are the only non-titanium watch cases Byrne makes, but they still have titanium casebacks.

Byrne’s open-dial watches all have the same 41.7mm case width and shape as their brushed-dial counterparts, except for the Gyro Dial MECA. The MECA, Byrne’s first manual-wind watch, has a pared-down 38mm case, only 12mm thick, and an unusual 12 o’clock crown.

Byrne Star

The Byrne Star is undoubtedly the brand’s most technically impressive watch. Generally, I’m not a huge fan of worldtimer watches as they’re usually too “busy” to read easily, but the Byrne Star completely rethinks the complication. First of all, they simplify things by using a 12-hour scale instead of a 24-hour scale. This allows Byrne to skip the usual 24-hour ring entirely, as each city name on a central rotating circle can be read as if it were the hour hand itself. Meaning, if the word “Havana” is pointing to the 4 o’clock marker, it’s 4 o’clock in Havana.

Cleverly, Byrne maximizes the use of the space on the central worldtimer disk by writing city names both around and across it. But the cleverest thing about the Byrne Star is probably the “Time Flow” complication. The cuboid hour markers on most Gyro Dials turn once every 24 hours, but here they change every six hours, revealing a different city each time.

The city names are calibrated so that their color matches the day-quadrant in that city (e.g. a dark starry night if it’s between 12-6 AM). Note that the Time Flow complication has nothing to do with the worldtimer function; although you might be able to see that it’s nighttime in Sydney, the exact time there is not shown. Let’s quickly break down all of Byrne’s releases:

Byrne Watches: Model Chart

Model Name	Size (mm)	Case Material	Movement (Caliber / Type)	Dial Description	MSRP
Gyro Dial 311	41.7 × 14.7	Grade 5 Titanium	Caliber 5555 / Automatic	Brushed (black)	CHF 18,000
Gyro Dial 311 Serie Sport	41.7 × 14.7	Grade 5 Titanium	Caliber 5555 / Automatic	Brushed (blue)	CHF 18,000
Gyro Dial 311 Casino (Midnight Blue)	41.7 × 14.7	Grade 5 Titanium	Caliber 5555 / Automatic	Brushed (blue)	CHF 19,000
Gyro Dial 311 Casino (Jet Black)	41.7 × 14.7	Grade 5 Titanium	Caliber 5555 / Automatic	Brushed (black)	CHF 19,000
Gyro Dial Indo Arabe	41.7 × 14.45	Grade 5 Titanium	Caliber 5555 / Automatic	Brushed (green)	$24,500 (limited to 10 pieces)
Gyro Dial Arqaam	41.7 × 14.45	Grade 5 Titanium	Caliber 5555 / Automatic	Brushed (sand) Cuboids with Nabataean, Musnad, Arabian, and Indo-Arab script	€22,200 (limited to 23 pieces)
Gyro Dial Zero (Silver)	41.7 × 14.7	Grade 5 Titanium	Caliber 5555 / Automatic	Open, visible silver mainplate	CHF 18,500
Gyro Dial Zero (Black)	41.7 × 14.7	Grade 5 Titanium	Caliber 5555 / Automatic	Open, visible slate mainplate	CHF 18,500
Gyro Dial MECA	38 × 12	Grade 5 Titanium	Caliber 5557 / Manual	Open, visible blue mainplate	CHF 25,000
Golf Limited Edition 2024	41.7 × 14.7	Grade 5 Titanium	Caliber 5555 / Automatic	Open, visible green mainplate	CHF 25,000 (limited to 24 pieces)
Gyro Dial Pink Gold 5N	41.7 × 14.45	18K 5N Rose Gold + Ti back	Caliber 5555 / Automatic	Open, visible slate mainplate	CHF 49,000
Gyro Dial Pink Gold & Diamonds	41.7 × 14.45	18K 5N Rose Gold + Ti back	Caliber 5555 / Automatic	Open, visible slate mainplate	CHF 54,000
Byrne Star	38 × 11.4	Grade 5 Titanium	Caliber 5558 / Manual	Mostly open, black with blue city ring	CHF 25,000

Movement

Byrne watch movements are produced by Le Temps Manufacture, an esteemed watchmaking atelier based in Fleurier, Switzerland. Although the top luxury watch brands in the $5,000-$15,000 range tend to get caught up in the in-house movement hubbub, many upscale independents in the $20,000-$60,000 ballpark (like Byrne) use ultra-high-end third-party movement suppliers. At a certain price point, the quality speaks for itself. And the patented Gyro Dial complication is something no other brand can use.

Caliber 5555 is the automatic movement powering the majority of the Byrne lineup, while 5557 is the manual-wind version found in the MECA and 5558 powers the Byrne Star.

Customizations

Like many ultra-luxe indie brands, Byrne is willing to consider customizations, within reason. Check out this Gyro Dial 311 with a slate dial, diamond-set cuboids (usually only found on a Pink Gold model), and all-black hands for example:

Byrne Watch Price

The list price of most Byrne watches ranges from $22,000-$31,000, with the pink gold versions reaching over $60,000. Because output is so low (probably a few hundred per year), Byrne watches tend to sell secondhand right around their original MSRP.

Richard Mille, Philippe Dufour, Franck Muller and F.P. Journe are among the most expensive watch brands today. All four brands have experienced massive success, and every one of their namesakes first spent years as a master restorer for a big-name traditional house. Byrne looks poised to join that list.