New Swarovski jewellery takes 125-year-old crystal brand in bold direction

Austrian crystal maker Swarovski is a low-key powerhouse in the fashion and lifestyle industry. You may be familiar with the 125-year-old brand’s signature animal figurines and its affordable jewellery but the Swarovski Group is an industrial behemoth that designs, manufactures and supplies crystals to countless companies around the world.

Focusing most of its marketing efforts on its jewellery line, Swarovski is mainly known for pieces that resonate with the masses: simple, everyday items that often lack the wow factor.

Nadja Swarovski, a descendant of the founder and member of the executive board formerly in charge of branding and communication – she was ousted last year in a company shake-up – had tried to elevate the brand by engineering collaborations with designers such as Christopher Kane and Mary Katrantzou. While these much-publicised collections helped burnish the company’s image among fashion insiders, the entry-level jewellery lines and those often maligned animal figurines have always been its bread and butter.

Amid last year’s shake-up, in which 750 stores were closed and 6,000 employees laid off, Swarovski named its first-ever global creative director.

Giovanna Battaglia Engelbert, a fashion veteran who has worked as an editor and consultant for more than two decades, is the woman in charge of the revamp of products, image, retail and marketing for the brand.

Battaglia Engelbert, however, is not completely new to Swarovski. Since 2016, she has been in charge of the loose components side of the company, the business-to-business division, which she describes as “the Willy Wonka factory of crystals”.

Because of the coronavirus pandemic, Battaglia Engelbert relied on messaging apps and Zoom meetings to create her first collection, which is launching this month. It is a radical departure from the Swarovski of yore.