Jacob & Co. is an American jewelry and watch company founded in New York in 1986 by diamond designer Jacob Arabo, and it might be the only brand in watchmaking that started out making jewelry for rappers before deciding it wanted to take on the Swiss at haute horlogerie. The company entered watchmaking in 2002 with a quartz world-timer, founded its own Geneva manufacture, Jacob & Co. SA, in 2007, and has since built some of the most technically extreme watches anyone has ever made, alongside some of the most diamond-encrusted. If your taste runs quiet, this brand will give you a headache. Loud is the whole business model.
Jacob Arabo, founder of Jacob & Co. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0.
From a Diamond District booth
Jacob Arabo’s family emigrated from Uzbekistan, then part of the USSR, to the United States when he was a teenager. He finished a jewelry design course in New York in 1981 at sixteen, then opened a small booth in Manhattan’s Diamond District where he designed pieces for jewelry labels and private clients. In 1986 he founded his own company, Diamond Quasar, and began designing under his own name: Jacob & Co.
By the early 1990s the kiosk had a reputation in the music industry. R&B singer Faith Evans brought in her husband, the Notorious B.I.G., who gave Arabo the nickname “Jacob the Jeweler” and introduced him to his friends in entertainment. Arabo was one of the first jewelers to make big diamond pieces for men, which is worth remembering the next time you see a rapper wearing a diamond chain, because he basically invented that lane. The client list grew into a phone book of the famous: Sean Combs, Jay-Z, Drake, 50 Cent, Madonna, Rihanna, Pharrell, Elton John, David and Victoria Beckham, Jennifer Lopez, Mariah Carey.
Key people and ownership
The company is still privately held, with Jacob Arabo as founder and chairman and his son Benjamin Arabov as chief executive. There has never been a sale, a merger, or a private equity buyout, which in this industry is rarer than it sounds. It remains a family business, for better and worse.
Here is the worse, stated plainly. In June 2006 Arabo was arrested at his Manhattan shop, and in 2008 he pleaded guilty to falsifying records and making false statements to investigators probing a Detroit drug ring’s money laundering. He was sentenced to two and a half years in federal prison and released in 2010. The company kept running the whole time. It is not my favorite chapter of the story, but leaving it out would be pretending, and I am not going to do that.
The move into serious watchmaking
In 2002 Arabo launched the Five Time Zone, a quartz watch with bold primary-colored dials showing multiple time zones, built for his clients’ jet-setting lives. Naomi Campbell, Bono, Angela Bassett, and Derek Jeter wore it. In 2004 the brand moved from the Diamond District to a flagship boutique on 57th Street and Park Avenue. So far this is a jewelry success story, and then it takes a sharp left turn into real watchmaking.
In 2007 Arabo founded Jacob & Co. SA in Geneva and unveiled the Quenttin, a watch with a vertical side-mounted tourbillon and a 31-day power reserve from seven mainspring barrels, the longest of any watch at the time. Then in 2014 came the Astronomia: a four-arm vertical movement that rotates in twenty minutes, carrying a magnesium Earth globe, a 288-facet one-carat “Jacob Cut” diamond, and a triple-axis tourbillon on its arms. Arabo called it the most important watch the company ever made. I am usually allergic to that kind of claim, but here it was hard to argue.
The greatest hits (and the diamond mountains)
Once Jacob & Co. had a real manufacture, the output got wilder. The Billionaire arrived in 2015: an 18-karat white gold watch covered in 260 carats of diamonds, priced at $18 million, and bought by boxer Floyd Mayweather in 2018. In 2016 came the Twin Turbo, the first watch to combine a twin triple-axis tourbillon with a minute repeater. The Twin Turbo Furious followed in 2018, adding a decimal minute repeater, a monopusher chronograph, and a time-difference calculator to the package.
The partnerships deserve their own paragraph because they define how this brand operates. In 2019 Jacob & Co. signed with Bugatti, and in 2020 the two released the Bugatti Chiron Tourbillon, with a tiny animated W16 engine complication sitting inside the case like a model car come to life. Other collaborations ran the full cultural spectrum: footballers Cristiano Ronaldo (2013) and Lionel Messi (2018), a Supreme-branded Four Time Zone (2020), gold and diamond paperclip jewelry with Virgil Abloh (2020), a musical watch that plays the Godfather theme, and the Astronomia Casino (2019) with a working miniature roulette wheel. In 2026 the brand released the God of Time, a tourbillon that completes a rotation every four seconds, claimed as the fastest in the world.
A Jacob & Co. billboard in Warsaw. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Why it matters
Jacob & Co. is genuinely polarizing, and both sides have a point. A lot of collectors treat the brand as a fashion watch with a diamond problem, and if your standard is restraint, understatement, and heritage, they are right to walk away. Nothing this company makes is subtle, nothing is priced sanely, and the constant celebrity partnerships can make it feel like a lifestyle brand that happens to own a manufacture.
But the manufacture part is real, and it deserves more respect than it usually gets. A vertical tourbillon with a 31-day power reserve, triple-axis tourbillons, minute repeaters paired with complications nobody else was combining, and world records in speed and sheer diamond tonnage are not things a fashion brand pulls off. The engineering is serious even when the taste is not, and plenty of us are too dumb and impressionable not to stare at an Astronomia spinning on its arms and feel something. This brand matters because it is the loudest proof in watchmaking that technical ambition and maximalism can live in the same case, and because outside the hobby, the people who buy these things do not care what the rest of us think. Fair enough.
Official site: jacobandco.com
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