Jacob & Co.

Jacob & Co. is a New York jewellery and watch house founded in 1986 by Jacob Arabo, who remains its founder and chairman. Arabo arrived in the United States from the former USSR as a child with his parents and four sisters, spent his first American summer apprenticed to a watchmaker, then trained in jewellery and began designing and making pieces in his bedroom after hours before opening a booth in New York's Diamond District. The company's first watch came from a childhood memory of a two-timezone watch his father gave him: the quartz Five Timezone, made with simple bezels and straps because Swiss suppliers had turned him away. A photograph of Naomi Campbell wearing it put the brand on the map for watches, and when Arabo returned to Switzerland he worked with a boutique watchmaking firm on the Quenttin, a vertical tourbillon with a 31-day power reserve, retailing from US$360,000. Today the company combines a New York base with Swiss watchmaking, with boutiques in New York and Geneva, among other cities.

Arabo says plainly that he is not a technician or engineer but a designer who funds and directs others, and the brand's stated aim is to make the impossible a reality rather than "hundreds of the same watches". Its mechanical watches have been developed with outside specialists, among them Luca Soprana and Atelier 7h38 for the SF24 and Astronomia, BNB Concept for the Quenttin, Concepto for the Bugatti Tourbillon and Le Cercle des Horlogers for several later complications. The brand says it has developed over 32 calibres featuring a tourbillon, and describes the JCAM60 movement of the God of Time as in-house developed. The company is privately held, with Arabo's son Benjamin Arabov as CEO.

The collections fall into several families. Astronomia, launched in 2014, is the celestial line: a wrist-sized planetary system with an orbital carousel, rotating globe and tourbillon, taken to a 47mm Four-Axis Tourbillon that completes a rotation every minute and the first four-axis tourbillon, with variants including Sky, Solar, Zodiac, Casino, Dragon, Revolution, Regulator and Maestro. Twin Turbo and Twin Turbo Furious are racing-inspired watches pairing twin tourbillons with a chronograph, a minute repeater and an in-house pitboard indicator that compares up to five lap times. Bugatti, created under a 2019 partnership with Bugatti Automobiles, brings hypercar architecture and a miniature engine to the Bugatti Tourbillon, Chiron Tourbillon and Calandre. Opera is the musical line, including the Godfather watches made under a partnership with Paramount Pictures, and the 49.5mm Oil Pump is a three-dimensional automaton of an oil well with a twin-axis tourbillon as its drill head.

The sports and travel lines include Epic X, in Chrono (44mm and 47mm), Skeleton, Bridges, Sport, ceramic and tourbillon versions with a range of partner editions, Epic SF24, the split-flap 24-hour world-time watch, and The World Is Yours Dual Time Zone, with and without tourbillon. Brilliant, Palatial, Fleurs de Jardin and Caviar are the gem-set and dress lines, with flying-tourbillon, mystery, baguette and pavé versions, while Billionaire is the extreme diamond tier, beginning with a one-of-one skeleton tourbillon entirely set with very large diamonds and now including the 189-carat Billionaire Ashoka, set with 280 Ashoka-cut diamonds. Other pieces include the Casino Tourbillon, The Mystery Tourbillon and licensed editions such as Batman (Gotham City). The 2026 God of Time, made for Arabo's 60th birthday, is a 44.5mm 18k rose gold watch shaped like an Ionian column whose tourbillon turns once every four seconds, limited to 60 pieces at US$360,000.

Prices run from roughly US$15,400 for an Epic X Sport to several hundred thousand dollars for the Bugatti and Twin Turbo tourbillons, and into eight figures for gem-set pieces. The highest retail price reported for any Jacob & Co. watch is US$20 million, for the unique-piece Billionaire Timeless Treasure unveiled in 2023, ahead of the US$18 million first-generation Billionaire. The brand makes about 3,975 watches per year, and SJX reports 2025 retail sales close to CHF 300 million, which makes Jacob & Co. far larger than most makers in this catalogue.