JACOB & CO
Founded in New York in 1986, when Jacob Arabo opened Diamond Quasar and began designing under the Jacob & Co label, the house became Swiss in 2007 with the founding of Jacob & Co. SA in Geneva. The Astronomia of 2014 — a vertical movement with four rotating arms — reframed the brand as a watchmaker, uniting two trades on one object: high complication and high-jewellery stone setting.
From a stand in the Diamond District to a Geneva manufacture
Very few watch houses are founded by someone who was not born into watchmaking, and fewer still arrive at high complication from the jewellery side. Jacob & Co did both, in a single career.
Jacob Arabo completed a jewellery design course in New York in 1981 and began where most independent jewellers begin, at a small stand in the city’s Diamond District. In 1986 he opened his own company, Diamond Quasar, and started designing under the label that carries his name.
The turn came in 2002 with the Five Time Zone: a quartz watch with five dials on one face, colourful and unapologetically contemporary. It was not a horological statement, but it made the name recognisable far beyond the jewellery trade.
The horological statement came later, and deliberately. In 2007 Arabo founded Jacob & Co. SA in Geneva and introduced the brand’s first high-watchmaking timepiece. That is the moment the company stopped being a New York jeweller who sold watches and became a watchmaker with a jewellery heritage.
The Astronomia, and what it changed
In 2014 the Astronomia Tourbillon arrived, and it did something no marketing budget can buy: it made serious collectors look again.
The movement stands vertically at the centre of the case rather than lying flat beneath a dial. Four arms rotate around that axis, carrying the hours and minutes, a tourbillon, and a spinning globe. The watch is legible only when you accept that the whole object is in motion — which is precisely the point.
The Astronomia became the brand’s signature architecture and the base for a long series of variations. It also set the register for everything that followed: complication as spectacle, executed to a standard that stands up to inspection.
The collections
Astronomia is the vertical-movement family and the brand’s identity. Epic covers the sports and chronograph register, including the Epic X and the SF24 travel-time references. Casino and Twin Turbo hold the animated complications, where a function is triggered and performs. Caviar and Brilliant are the lines where the jewellery craft leads and the movement supports.
Collectors generally enter through Epic or Brilliant, then move to Astronomia. The high point of the range sits well beyond that: the Billionaire of 2015, an emerald-cut diamond watch announced at 18 million dollars, remains the reference point for what the house is willing to attempt.