Gagà Laboratorio

Gagà Laboratorio is a luxury watch brand founded in 2020 by Ruben Tomella — the entrepreneur who had spent twenty years building Gagà Milano into one of Italy's most internationally recognised watch brands — as a deliberate departure from everything he had done before. Having led Gagà Milano since its inception, Tomella felt the time had come to make a leap into a new world: one in which watches would be created not for brand recognition or volume, but purely from a passion for beauty and design. The legal and manufacturing entity behind Gagà Laboratorio is Manufacture Gagà SA, the Swiss company registered in Ticino that has been designing and producing high-end watches for Gagà Milano since 2012 and which Tomella now redirected toward this new, more artistically ambitious project.

The creative partnership that defines Gagà Laboratorio is between Tomella and Mo Coppoletta — an internationally renowned artist, tattooist, illustrator, and designer based in London, who serves as the brand's Art Director. Coppoletta's background spans fine art, graphic design, and a celebrated career in tattooing and illustration with deep roots in Japanese and traditional Western visual traditions; he brings to the brand a sensibility rooted in the idea that a watch's perceived value should be substantially higher than its commercial positioning. Every design at Gagà Laboratorio begins in London, where Coppoletta transforms the initial concept into paper sketches and refined 2D renderings. The watch then crosses to Lugano, where the Manufacture Gagà SA team develops the 3D model, engineers the prototype, and oversees all phases of production in close collaboration with Swiss partners in Ticino — adhering fully to Swiss Made certification. The brand has been featured in Forbes, Hypebeast, Monochrome, Revolution, The Rake, Time and Tide, WatchPro, and Worn & Wound. All watches are covered by a lifetime International Warranty Programme, activated through the brand's 'The Clab' online platform.

The collection currently comprises three lines. The Labormatic is the core series — the brand's founding expression of Italian design meeting Swiss precision, covering a range of elegantly proportioned automatic watches distinguished by their bold, sculptural dials and distinctive use of colour and texture. The Labormatic Cinquanta is a special model within this family, conceived in partnership with Alessandro Ristori, Italy's internationally celebrated jazz and swing musician — a partnership conceived as a shared ambassadorship for 'La Dolce Vita' worldwide. The Cinquanta (Italian for 'fifty') draws its inspiration from the post-war zest for life of the 1950s, the decade that defined Italy's economic boom and gave the world its most enduring images of elegance, pleasure, and style — precisely the era that also shaped the musical tradition Ristori embodies and carries forward. The collaboration produced not only the watch but a short film, 'Le Scelte Giuste' (The Right Choices), written by Mo Coppoletta and Alessandro Ristori, exploring the philosophical choices that define an artist's creative life. The Labormatic Cinquanta is priced at CHF 3,900 + VAT. The Aqualab is the brand's diving and water-sports line — bold, technical, and built for aquatic adventure while retaining the visual signature of the Coppoletta-designed aesthetic. The Luce ('light' in Italian) is the ladies' collection, exploring the interplay of light across gem-set dials and refined feminine proportions.