The Rise and Fall of Jacob & Co

Added: 2026-05-10

[00:00:00]There was a time when wearing a Jacob and Co. watch me meant you had made it.

[00:00:04]But something changed. The world that built Jacob and Co. started to shift.

[00:00:08]And when it did, the very thing that made the brand unstoppable started to work against it. This is the story of the rise and fall of Jacob and Co. This isn't just a story about a watch company. It's a story about timing, culture, what happens when a brand becomes perfect for a moment and that moment moves on. But here's the thing about this story. The fall people usually talk about, that's not the real fall. The real one happened quietly years later and it's still happening.

[00:00:37]Part one, the outsider. Yakov Arab or Jacob Arabo as would be known as arrived in Queens, New York with his parents and four sisters. His father back in Usuzbekiststan had run a business distributing liquor. He was a successful man by Soviet standards, but in America he was nothing. So when the family arrived in America, the father took whatever work he could find. But the family weren't truly living. The family scrimped and scraped, barely getting by.

[00:01:08]Yakov enrolled at Forest Hills High School, watched his parents struggle, and made a decision. He was going to contribute. Then he did something that everyone who has ever pursued the American dream would call an alpha move.

[00:01:21]At 16, he dropped out and signed up for a six-month government course in jewelry design. He finished it in 4 months, not because he rushed, but because he was that good. His teachers told him to make jewelry his career. He left school for good, took a job in a Manhattan jewelry factory, and earned $125 a week. This was good money for a teenager in 1981, but Yakov gave most of it to his family.

[00:01:46]He wasn't doing it for himself. But he didn't stop at $125 a week. He couldn't.

[00:01:52]He had too much at stake. He needed more. He had to be more. At night, he designed. His hands became fluent in the material long before his English caught up. He would study the scraps of gold left over from the factory floor. One evening, he spotted leftover gold tubing sitting in a pile. He took it home and shaped it into a bracelet. They sold through immediately. That was the moment he understood something crucial. He didn't just want to make jewelry for other people's designs. He wanted to make his own. And so he did. By 17, he had opened his own small workshop near the Diamond District, Manhattan's 47th Street, where the world's gem trade converges into one dense corridor of dealers, setters, polishers, and merchants. To the existing community there, he was an outsider. Jewish. Yes, the Diamond District has deep Jewish roots, but Soviet Jewish, Bkarian, with an accent and no inherited connections.

[00:02:50]The old guard of the district had relationships built across generations.

[00:02:54]He had talent and nerve. In the jewelry business, talent and nerve will only take you so far without the relationships. He was going to have to find a different door. He would work in the factory 4 days a week and spend the other three days walking department stores personally selling his designs.

[00:03:11]He was 17 and he looked older. He says he used that. I had a knack for designing what people wanted, he recalled later. the big gold hoops, that kind of thing. By 1986, at 21 years old, he had his own jewelry shop on 6th Avenue. He called the company Diamond Quazar. He called the designs Jacob and Co. He had started with $1,500 in savings and a willingness to work hours that other people found irrational. The Diamond District noticed slowly, but the world outside it didn't.

[00:03:43]Not yet. For that, he needed an introduction to a different room entirely. There is one detail from this period that you shouldn't lose sight of.

[00:03:51]Jacob was not just designing and selling. He was studying. He would visit department stores personally, watch how customers moved through displays, and listen to what they said about jewelry when they thought no one was paying attention. He understood desire before he understood the market. And that understanding, what people actually wanted versus what the industry had decided to offer them, was going to become the engine of everything that came next. The Diamond District had its establishments. Jacob wasn't interested in their rules. He was interested in who else wasn't getting served. Part two, the cultural takeover. In the late 80s and early 90s, something was happening in American music that the jewelry industry had not yet figured out. Hip hop was becoming a dominant commercial force. The artists making that music, rappers, producers, DJs were earning serious money and spending it conspicuously. They wanted jewelry that said something big, bold, custom, diamonds on things that had never had diamonds on them before. The traditional jewelry industry mostly didn't want their business. Their aesthetic was too loud, their tastes too far from the conservative European model that fine jewelry had always followed. They got directed to cheaper counters. They got looked over. Jacob Arabo did not look over them. His own experience as an outsider, someone who had grown up knowing what it felt like to be the person in the room that the establishment didn't quite see, made him different. He made his clients comfortable, as one account described it. Despite the tailored suits and the carefully maintained style, Jacob had the faint shadow of the outsider, the same shadow his clients carried. They recognized each other. The first significant commission that changed everything came from Biz Marky, the rapper known for just a friend. Marky wanted a custom piece, something that had never been made. He described it.

[00:05:47]Jacob built it. A four-finger ring that spelled biz in diamondstudded script.

[00:05:52]Nobody in the diamond district would have touched an order like that. Jacob said yes before the conversation was finished. Marky wore the ring everywhere on stage, in photooots, on the cover of a hit single. It became part of his identity and the jewelry became part of the story. Then notorious BI walked into the shop. Biggie Smalls was at that moment becoming one of the most famous people in America. He ordered pieces. He came back. He started telling his friends. He gave Jacob a name, Jacob the Jeweler. That nickname passed through the hip hop ecosystem like a current.

[00:06:31]Jay-Z mentioned him. Nas referenced him.

[00:06:34]The name Jacob became shorthand for a level of achievement. By the mid90s, Jacob Arabo had done something nobody had done in the same way before. He had created jewelry specifically designed for men featuring oversized diamonds in configurations that had no precedent in the traditional catalog. Large diamond pieces for men. That was not a category that existed in any formal sense before he built it. The move to watches came in 2002. He looked at his clients. They were people who traveled constantly, who lived on five continents simultaneously, who moved between time zones the way most people change neighborhoods and designed the five time zone. A quartz watch with five separate movements, each displaying a different time zone simultaneously.

[00:07:20]It was colorful, graphic, interchangeable, and conceptually direct. If you need to know the time in five cities at once, here it is. All five right now. Naomi Campbell wore it.

[00:07:32]Bono wore it. Derek Jeter wore it. It wasn't a serious watchmaker's watch. It was something else, a lifestyle object that happened to contain movements. The watch community mostly ignored it, but the cultural community noticed. Jacob had entered watchmaking and he had done it the same way he'd entered jewelry by serving the client that everyone else overlooked. What made this era so significant goes deeper than the celebrity names. What Jacob understood and executed better than anyone before him was that this generation of newly wealthy people needed someone to build them an entirely new visual language for success. The traditional luxury establishment spoke to old money, restraint, heritage, the understated signal. Hip hop culture was building something different. Success was meant to be visible, undeniable, impossible to ignore. You had come from nothing and you had made something and you were going to let the world see it. Jacob was the person who made that tangible. He didn't judge it. He didn't try to soften it towards something the traditional market would have preferred. He amplified it. He went bigger than his clients even imagined to ask for. That's what they remember. Not only did you walk around with the jewelry, as one account put it. You walked around with the guy. Being seen with Jacob was itself a statement. Jacob didn't take over the culture. The culture adopted him because he was the only one paying attention when they walked in. Part three. The spectacle king. To understand the fall, you have to feel the peak first. really feel it because it was genuinely extraordinary. In 2007, Jacob Arabo founded Jacob and Co. SA in Geneva, Switzerland. The move that signaled he was no longer content being the jeweler who also made watches. He was becoming a watch maker. That year, he introduced the Quentyn, a time piece with a vertical tobon and a 31-day power reserve, the longest power reserve in watchmaking at the time. The established Swiss houses who had spent decades competing over who could squeeze the most days out of a wound spring suddenly had to acknowledge that an immigrant from Queens via Tshkent was doing something they hadn't done. But the Quinton was a warm-up. In 2014 at Basel World, the most important annual gathering of the watch industry, Jacob and Co unveiled the Astronomia Torbjon.

[00:10:00]This is the watch that changed the argument permanently. Imagine a traditional watch lying flat in its case. The movement hidden beneath a dial. The Astronomia does the opposite.

[00:10:10]The movement itself is the spectacle.

[00:10:13]Four arms extend from a central barrel like the hands of a compass, and the entire structure rotates inside the case, one full revolution every 20 minutes. On one arm, a miniature globe of the Earth painted in lacquer rotating on its own axis. On the opposite arm, a diamond cut with 288 facets which also rotates catching and scattering light continuously. On the other two arms, a tripleaxis torbion spinning in three directions simultaneously and a time display that uses a differential gear system to remain perfectly upright as everything else turns around it. The watch looks like a solar system. It moves like one. Every second of wear produces a different visual than the second before. Swiss watch makers who had devoted careers to complications.

[00:11:01]People who had spent decades inside the Geneva Italers examined the astronomia and acknowledged it not as jewelry, as watchmaking, as a genuine engineering statement about what a mechanical object could be. Arab himself said, "We took what had been a flat torbon and made it vertical and made it turn around the dial. We took traditional Swiss watchmaking and turned it on its head."

[00:11:24]He was right. The astronomia was genuinely revolutionary. Not in the way that word gets applied lazily to things that are merely new, but in the specific sense that it produced something with no real predecessor. By 2016, there were 99 iterations of the Astronomia. A roulette wheel version, a version with a working miniature Bugatti engine, a version that played the theme from the Godfather on demand, the opera collection of musical watches, the Astronomia Casino, the Twin Turbo Collection, two synchronized Torbians in a case that looked like a racing engine. And then in 2015, the watch that Floyd Mayweather bought, the billionaire, $18 million, 18 karat white gold case and bracelet, 260 karat of diamonds, every individual stone 3 karat or larger. When Mayweather, a man famous for buying the most extravagant version of everything, pulled this watch onto his wrist, it became more than a purchase. It became a cultural moment.

[00:12:28]Here was the most maximalist possible expression of success, and a man synonymous with excess had decided it was the one that represented him. The billionaire wasn't just a watch that cost a lot. It was the object that existed at the outer edge of what was materially possible. The yellow diamond version required 3 and 1/2 years to source enough stones, 880 carat of raw material before you could begin cutting.

[00:12:53]The watch was impossible in the most literal sense, impossible to make casually, impossible to wear without commanding every room you entered. When Mayweather bought the billionaire, it became mythology. He was the best brand ambassador Jacob and Co. could have asked for. A man whose entire existence was a statement about having more than anyone else. The billionaire became the watch that represented the absolute ceiling. The thing that even the ultra wealthy paused in front of that singularity, that sense of one-of-a-kind impossibility made tangible was the actual product, not just the diamonds, the story. At this moment, roughly 2014 to 2018, Jacob and Co. was unavoidable.

[00:13:37]If you wanted to demonstrate that you had transcended normal categories of wealth, there was only one name, Jacob.

[00:13:44]The astronomia didn't just change what Jacob and co meant. It changed what a watch could mean. That's very rare and it almost never lasts. Part four, the fall. Nobody noticed. Here is the important distinction that most coverage of this story misses. Jacob Arabo went to prison, but that is not the fall.

[00:14:03]We'll get to that soon. The brand's cultural relevance declined. That is the fall. And it happened separately before the legal troubles in some ways and accelerating around them, but fundamentally for different reasons.

[00:14:17]Around 2018 to 2020, something shifted in the luxury market that Jacob and Co.

[00:14:22]was structurally unprepared for. The aesthetic that had defined the peak, maximum diamonds, maximum visibility, maximum excess began to feel like a different era. The cultural conversation around luxury started moving in the opposite direction. The term quiet luxury entered the mainstream. The idea real wealth doesn't need to announce itself. A watch from Otmar's Payday in its most restrained form. A steel PC Philippe with a leather strap. Something that required knowledge to read rather than optics to notice. The people who shaped taste, the stylists, the cultural editors, the taste makers in music and fashion began gravitating toward watches that rewarded close inspection rather than glances from across the room. Jacob and Co's entire value proposition was built for the glance from across the room. This isn't a moral judgment. It's a timing problem. The aesthetic that Jacob had helped create. The vocabulary of visible success that ran through hip hop culture from the late 90s through the 2010s was being superseded. Not by better taste, but by different taste.

[00:15:31]The generation defining luxury in the 2020s had grown up watching the previous generation's excess and decided they wanted the opposite. The comparison that stings most directly. Richard Mill, a Swiss independent watchmaker who emerged around the same time Jacob was building his reputation. Richard Mill watches are expensive, some extremely so. They are technically complex, but they are also visually calm, architecturally interesting in a way that rewards knowledge and associated with an athletic, performance-driven aesthetic that felt modern rather than maximalist.

[00:16:05]Richard Mill watches appeared on Rafael Nadal's wrist during Grand Slam finals, on Felipe Masa's wrist inside an F1 cockpit. The association was with achievement rather than display. Jacob's core association had always been with display. That was the point. That was the product. When the definition of aspiration shifted from visibility to knowledge, from you can see what I have to you have to understand what this is.

[00:16:33]Jacob and Co. was on the wrong side of the shift. What made it worse is that the brand accelerated exactly when it should have paused. There was also a specific problem the brand created for itself. The billionaire watch, the object that had defined the absolute peak of the brand's power, lost its mystique through repetition. The original 2015 piece was singular. Its price, its diamonds, its scale, the fact that it was one piece. That singularity was part of what it was. It was the impossible made tangible. Then came the billionaire 3, priced at $3 million, produced in 18 pieces. not one 18. The thing that had been impossible was now available for a sixth of the original price to 17 additional people.

[00:17:21]Mayweather had bought the watch because it was the ceiling. Jacob and Co. then installed a new ceiling below the old one and put 18 people inside it. Luxury is not only about quality. It is also about scarcity. The feeling that what you have exists at a level that almost nobody else can reach. Once you produce 18 versions of the most expensive thing you ever made, you have changed what that thing means permanently. You cannot go back and reclaim the singularity. The mythology was the product and they had sold it 18 times. The brand didn't get worse. The world changed around it and it kept doing exactly what it had always done. That's a different problem and it's harder to fix. Part five, the federal hammer. In August 2006, the FBI raided Jacob Arabo's offices. Federal prosecutors alleged that Arabo had been connected to the Black Mafia Family, a Detroit-based drug trafficking organization, and that he had helped launder approximately $270 million in drug money. The charges were serious, the investigation was serious, and the timing, arriving just as the brand was at a cultural inflection point, landed with full force. For two years, the case moved through the federal system. Arabo maintained his position. Eventually, in June 2008, he pleaded guilty, but not to the original money laundering charges.

[00:18:48]Those were dropped. He pleaded guilty to the lesser offense of falsifying records and making false statements. He had accepted money and failed to properly report it. He had broken the law and then misrepresented what he had done. He was sentenced to 2 and 1/2 years in federal prison. He was fined $50,000. He was ordered to forfeit $2 million to the government. In his statement to the sentencing judge, he said, "I feel ashamed that I broke the laws of this country, a country that has been so good for me." That line is worth sitting with. A man who had come to America at 14 with nothing. A man who had built something extraordinary through talent and relentless work. A man who had lived exactly the version of the American story that the country tells itself it's for became the man that violated the trust of the place that had made him.

[00:19:37]The Black Mafia Family Connection tells you something about the world Jacob was operating in. The people buying his most expensive pieces, the people whose names had made his reputation. Some of them were moving money that came from places no legitimate business touches. Jacob accepted it. He didn't ask enough questions. He did what the federal prosecutors said he did, which was falsify records and make false statements about where money came from.

[00:20:01]He didn't run the drug operation. He laundered the proceeds. That distinction matters legally, which is why the charges were ultimately reduced, but it doesn't make the underlying act clean.

[00:20:12]Jacob Arabo served his sentence. But here is why the structure of this story puts this section after the cultural fall and not before. The legal case is not what took the brand down. The brand had been losing cultural altitude before the prison sentence and continued losing it after. Many brands have survived founders who faced serious legal trouble. The legal case made headlines.

[00:20:35]The cultural drift made history. The prison story is the one that gets told because it is the dramatic one. The fall of relevance is the one that actually matters. They are different events and conflating them misses the real lesson.

[00:20:49]He broke the law. He paid the price. He came back. But the culture that had made his name had already started to move on.

[00:20:56]And that was a bill no courtroom could settle. Before we move on to the next part, let me tell you this. Most people don't realize this, but buying a watch the wrong way can cost you thousands, and you won't even notice it until it's too late. You walk into a store or browse online, and everything looks the same. But behind the scenes, there's a system. Prices aren't always fair.

[00:21:18]availability is controlled and one bad decision can leave you overpaying for something that doesn't even hold its value. That's why I created a complete free insider guide to buying watches.

[00:21:31]Inside, you'll find the best watches to buy, the watches to avoid, and how to choose a watch that actually fits your style and budget long-term. The goal is simple. I'll help you stop guessing and start buying smart. You'll find the free guide in the pinned comment and description. Now, let's move on to the next part. Part six, the reinvention.

[00:21:54]Jacob Arabo came out of prison in 2010 and rebuilt. By 2013, the Astronomia existed. That timing matters. He didn't emerge from federal prison and coast on his old reputation. He emerged and made what became the most technically ambitious watch of his career. The reinvention has been genuine on the watchmaking side. The Astronomia is not a stunt. The movement is genuinely complex, genuinely engineered, and acknowledged as such by people who have spent their careers inside traditional Swiss watchmaking. The Twin Turbo Furious, which features a pair of synchronized Torbjons and a decimal minute repeater inside a fully transparent sapphire case, is a technical achievement by any standard.

[00:22:38]The brand moved into collaborations that pushed engineering rather than just aesthetics. The Bugatti Chiron Torbjon, which recreates a working engine inside a watch case and features a movement whose components move like pistons. The Casino Torbjon, which hides the mechanical complexity in service of a fully functional roulette wheel. These are not objects that can be faked. His son, Benjamin Arab, now serves as CEO.

[00:23:06]The brand opened its first store in Seoul in 2025. It is still expanding. At Watches and Wonders 2023, the most important annual watch event in the industry, Jacob and Co. presented the $20 million billionaire timeless treasure. Revenue is moving, but the reinvention is also still struggling with the fundamental positioning problem. The brand is committed to maximum spectacle in an era that has decided spectacle is dated. The collaborations with Supreme, with Alec Monopoly, with the Scarface musical watch, these speak to a cultural language that is no longer defining the conversation. The watch press has begun to take Jacob and Co more seriously as engineers, and that is real progress.

[00:23:52]The technical credibility of the Astronomia, the twin turbo, and the opera movements is established among people who understand watchmaking. This is a meaningful shift from the early 2000s when the brand was considered exclusively a jeweler who had wandered into herology. SJX watches, one of the most rigorous independent watch journalism outlets, published a comprehensive technical retrospective on Jacob and Co. 40 years of watchmaking in 2026. It treated the brand's movement work as genuinely significant. That kind of coverage doesn't happen for brands that are only doing aesthetics. Whether technical credibility translates into the kind of cultural prestige that drives the really expensive watches is the open question. The buyers who pay six or seven figures for a watch are not making purely technical decisions. They are making identity decisions. And Jacob and Co is still for most of that buyer segment associated with a version of success that the current moment defines as a previous era. He came back. He built something real. The question is whether real is enough when the culture has moved on to a different definition of what real means. Part seven, the verdict. Here is what the story of Jacob and Co. actually is underneath the diamonds and the federal case and the astronomia. It is the story of a man who understood his moment with extraordinary precision and then failed to understand when the moment had ended. Jacob Arabo saw in the late 80s that there was an entire generation of newly wealthy people who wanted luxury jewelry and couldn't find anyone willing to make it for them the way they wanted it. He served that gap brilliantly. He didn't just fill it, he defined what it meant to fill it. He created a category. He saw in the early 2010s that there was an opportunity to move watchmaking from decoration into spectacle. to take the internal mechanics of a time piece and make them the visual event rather than the functional underpinning. The astronomia is the purest expression of that vision. It is genuinely one of the most original objects produced in the history of modern watchmaking. But he didn't see or couldn't act on what he saw when the definition of luxury prestige shifted away from visibility.

[00:26:08]The transition from look what I have to know what this is happened and Jacob and Co stayed on the wrong side of it. Not because they got worse, because they stayed exactly the same while the culture moved. There is a specific truth buried in all of this that goes beyond Jacob and Co. The luxury market does not reward the loudest. It rewards the most current. And current is not a fixed target. It moves. A brand that defines a moment perfectly is not automatically equipped to define the next one. The tools that won the first battle, maximum diamonds, maximum spectacle, celebrity by association can become liabilities in the second one. Jacob and Co. didn't fall because they made something nobody wanted anymore. They made things people still bought. They fell in terms of the cultural conversation, the kind of status their name conferred because they kept making things for the person who used to be at the center of the room.

[00:27:07]While the people in the room changed, Richard Mill is the watch that defined the next generation's version of conspicuous success. Paddock Philip's steel sports watches became a symbol of insider knowledge. Rolex became so dominant in resale value that owning one became a financial statement rather than just an aesthetic one. None of these are the language Jacob and Co. speaks.

[00:27:31]Consider what Jay-Z wears now versus what he wore in 1997.

[00:27:36]The person who made Jacob the jeweler famous spent the9s and early 2000s drowning in chains and watches that announced themselves from 20 ft. By the 2020s, that same person had moved to watches that required research to understand. The client grew up, the aesthetic moved, the brand stayed.

[00:27:54]That's not a failure of ambition. It might actually be a failure of the opposite, of always needing to be louder, bigger, more. The refusal to become something quieter, even when the market was asking for it, is what defined the plateau. They still make extraordinary objects. The Astronomia in its best versions is genuinely spectacular. The technical ambition of the twin turbo furious is real. Jacob Arao is still designing. His son is running the brand. But the story of Jacob and Co. is the story of a man who built his empire on the premise that more is more and then watched the world decide slowly and without drama that sometimes less is more. Not wrong. just yesterday and not finished but fighting a battle that has already moved on to different ground. Jacob and Co didn't lose relevance by getting worse. It lost relevance by staying exactly the same while the world changed around it. So, have you ever owned one of their watches? What do you think of the brand?

[00:28:55]Let's chat about it in the comments.

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