Young, confident and with a plan, Benjamin Arabov is ready to place his stamp on Jacob & Co. as its new CEO, effective immediately. He is joining forces with his father, Jacob Arabo, who founded the company and grew the business from a kiosk in the New York Diamond District to an international luxury watch and jewelry brand with a network of more than 60 retail locations worldwide. Arabov will be working from the brand’s worldwide headquarters and flagship boutique on 57th Street and Park Avenue in New York.
At 28 years of age, Arabov joins a rarefied group of luxury executives who are both in their 20s and who lead family-owned brands. This includes the two sons of LVMH Chief Executive, Bernard Arnault, who have leadership responsibilities for brands within the luxury goods holding company, Alexandre and Frédéric Arnault.
Jacob Arabo’s rise in the luxury watch and jewelry industry is a true rags to riches story. He arrived in the U.S. from Uzbekistan and spent his teenage years learning the jewelry trade, eventually creating his own pieces before launching as Jacob & Co. in 1986.
Although Arabo (who doesn’t use the “v” ending for his professional surname) started out offering moderately priced, traditional jewelry, his designs caught the attention of Hip-Hop artists and he became a celebrity in his own right known as “Jacob the Jeweler.” In 2005 he relocated to East 57th St. and his business now has more than 100 employees worldwide.
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The watches and jewels of Jacob & Co. are not for the timid and meek. They are in-your-face bling. Lavish jewels that boast exceptionally large diamonds and colored gems in a myriad of combinations. Many of the watches are among the largest in the industry, because of the multiple complications they contain, such as triple-axis tourbillions, astronomical mechanics, music boxes, and car-inspired timepieces with replicas of working 16-cylinder engines. All of the complications are easily visible inside the sapphire crystal cases.
Arabo creates the watch concepts and a staff of about 50 watchmakers and designers in the Jacob & Co. Geneva office makes them come to life. They work with Swiss watch industry suppliers in a way that is consistent with the Swiss watchmaking tradition even though his ideas are far from traditional. “I decided I wanted to go into serious complications, inventing movements that have never been done before,” Arabo said. And that’s exactly what he did.
Meanwhile, Benjamin Arabov has been concentrating on moving the company into the digital age and it will remain his focus as he leads the business. Since he took over the social media activities of the company as a consultant in 2017, Jacob & Co.'s combined social media audience grew from 200,000 to 2.5 million followers. He says the company’s main Instagram account is the fastest growing among its peers, along with TikTok. This concentration in social media has directly led to annual year-on-year growth in sales of 20% to 30% for the past four years, he said.
“We are producing never before seen complications at a rate that no other luxury watch brand is producing. Over the past five years we’ve launched more collections than our competitors have in 20-plus years. Additionally, our products have a natural ‘jaw dropping’ effect. Most are in awe when they see our watches,” Arabov said. “It’s for that exact reason why digital is so important to us. We have so much creativity to show, we can’t sit around waiting for a trade show or a magazine cover featuring our watch. We want the world to discover the creative genius of my father and there is no better way in today’s world to showcase that creativity than on social media.”
He says the importance of digital media for luxury goods was underscored during the pandemic. “When the world shut down and no one was walking into the stores because of the pandemic, the majority of our sales happened over the phone. We adjusted very quickly, adapting to full digital (making sales through digital media) and had our best year yet.”
Arabov also wants to launch an e-commerce platform. This will indeed be a challenge and serve as a measure of how much people are willing to spend online on a regular basis with jewels and watches that start at the five-figure level and can run more than a million dollars.
Surprisingly, Arabov left the family business when he was 19 years old to start companies on his own. His focus on digital media came to fruition with Grow Enrollments, a consulting company he founded in 2016 that focuses on generating digital leads for educational institutions through Google AdWords. He started the business with $1,500 of his own money. The company achieved $6 million in revenue in 2020. This success led him to be named to Forbes 30under30 list for 2021.
Arabov said by going on his own he gained eight years of digital experience and six years experience running a successful business. And he was always planning to return to the family business when the time was right.
“Even at a young age I knew there was only so much value I can bring if I was only learning within the four walls of Jacob & Co,” he said. “It was difficult to leave and it was one of the toughest conversations I’ve had with my father, but it was well worth it because now I have come back with a wealth of knowledge as a digital marketing expert and knowing how to run a business.”
In addition to digital initiatives, Arabov says his responsibilities will be to continue the growth of the brand globally. This will include managing staff over five continents, developing and implementing business strategies and maintaining relationships with partners such as the high performance car manufacturer, Bugatti.
Arabov says he and his father have different skill sets so they will mostly be out of each other’s way. “We are not banging heads because as we all know, family businesses are not easy so it’s important that we collaborate but also stay in our own areas and focus on our strengths to take this business to the next level. Also, I’ve been learning from my father’s entrepreneurial mentality my whole life and now I get to continue doing that every day, working side by side with him in the business.”
Arabov seems ready to accept the obstacles of managing a growing company with annual revenues described by him in the “nine-figure range.” “It’s a complex business which involves creative solutions and out-of-the-box thinking. We have also been experiencing significant consistent growth over the past four years due to our digital growth so there is an additional added pressure to keep the momentum going to continue growing,” he said. “It’s a great challenge for me.”
While Arabov has the leadership title, the company’s true leader, his father, isn’t going anywhere. If things go to plan, Arabov says his father will work specifically on the creative side designing products, managing the sales team, overseeing product production and focusing on “big picture” projects giving him the freedom and focus to do what he does best and opening the doors for even more innovation for the brand.
“As a business owner, you wear many different hats and generally you work on projects that you love and projects that you just can’t stand. My goal is to alleviate my father from working on the projects he doesn’t enjoy so he can put all of his energy, focus and attention into what he is best at. I believe that will not only make him happier, but we can also grow at a faster rate.”
Meanwhile, Jacob Arabo has confidence in his son’s ability to move the company to the next level.
“My vision for Jacob & Co. is multi-generational longevity. Our world is changing fast, especially after the pandemic. The entire haute horology industry is navigating what the future will look like,” Arabo said. “By combining Benjamin’s digital aptitude with Jacob & Co.’s DNA, I believe he will take our company to new heights. Benjamin will re-engineer Jacob & Co.’s core competencies as a global brand, as we are set to pioneer our industry into a new era. I am proud of the accomplishments we have had since I founded the company, and I am excited to launch its next chapter with Benjamin as our new CEO.”
Benjamin Arabov says his overall goal is to build a brand that over the years will earn the same heritage of prestigious Swiss watch brands.
“Looking at the history of the luxury watch industry, most of the well-known watch brands — Vacheron Constantin, Audemars Piguet, Cartier, Piaget — started as family businesses and took off during their second and third generations. I hope to stand on the shoulders of giants and take Jacob & Co. to this level.”
