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In
the pristine white bedroom of her grand, second floor Cadogan Square apartment,
Nadja Swarovski, smart in black tailoring and sparkly earrings, is handing
round chocolate biscuits and apologising. "Sorry about the mess,"
she says in her accent, a cocktail of German and American, gesturing at
the immaculate space. Actually, barring the presence of a rocking horse
in the window, you'd scarcely imagine she shared it with her two toddlers,
Rigby, 2, and Thalia,1, and her husband, hedge fund manager Rupert Adams.
Perhaps she spends all her time tidying up?
But while Nadja exudes the groomed elegance of a woman who can spend her
entire life on maintaining herself and her home, appearances are deceptive.
It is she who has turned the Swarovski crystal company, founded by her
great-great-grandfather Daniel Swarovski in 1895, into a company with
a turnover of more than 2bn euros a year.
Until Nadja got her hands on it, Swarovski was known to the public for
the kitsch crystal animals that adorned many an elderly lady's mantelpiece.
Now, thanks to her drive, networking with designers to bring Swarovski
crystals back into style's front line, her family's products are used
and credited by Alexander McQueen and Armani, drip from chandeliers designed
by Tom Dixon and most recently, decorated Meryl Streep's fingers in the
Devil Wears Prada. More of which later.
Nadja, who seems tense and excited whenever she talks about the business,
says she is a workaholic and is often at her Mayfair office during the
weekends. You can't help wondering what gives her the energy. She has
more reason than most to take it easy: not just because she has no financial
need to work (the Swarovskis are known as the 'Austrian Rockefellers'),
nor even that she is the mother of two young children, but because just
over a year ago, she was the victim of a particularly horrible burglary
- the sort that would certainly have sent a lesser woman fleeing to the
country house she owns in Gloucestershire in pursuit of bucolic peace.
Nadja, however, has not only carried on regardless; she has refused even
to move from the flat where the burglary took place. It was November 2005,
she was nine months pregnant with Thalia and taking it easy when two opportunistic
burglars in their thirties spotted that her door had been left on the
latch by workmen.
"It was at 12.15pm," she says, still obviously astonished by
their temerity. "We were living in this area because we thought it
would be so safe, especially in the middle of the day, but these two guys
broke in. It was negligence, a chance attack - both front doors were open
and the doorman
wasn't at the door. The burglars, who were unarmed, were clearly surprised
to see me. I think they were so shocked they didn't know what to do. They
said 'Get down!'- I thought, 'How? I'm nine months pregnant' But I managed
to get face down on the floor. They didn't do anything for ten seconds.
I didn't know what they were going to do. Then I thought 'Rigby!' My son
[who was not at home at the time] was my motivation to move and try and
do something about the situation. I got up and said, 'What do you want?
Tell me.' They said, 'The safe' so I took them to it.
"During the entire time, I didn't know if they would harm me but
ironically, my saving grace was my pregnancy- I think they actually felt
some sympathy towards me. They took my wedding jewellery and everything
but I was almost grateful by the time they left because they could have
done anything and they didn't. I just felt then, 'my life is fine.' The
pieces they took are replaceable. My lesson was that the material is immaterial.
Rigby is my treasure, and that treasure wasn't touched." Neither
of the burglars was ever caught, though the police did what they could,
but there were no fingerprints and nothing from the theft was recovered.
The drama has affected her outlook on life permanently, she believes:
'There's constantly a sign up somewhere saying 'a robbery has occurred
here', one street down, two streets down. It's disconcerting that it's
still happening but what worries me most is that I feel the neighbourhood's
not doing much to prevent crime. You're left to your own devices and you
just have to be a more cautious citizen when you walk the streets. We
just
have to accept that's the state of life nowadays.'
Amazingly, she claims to have had no post-traumatic stress after the attack
- taking it all in her stride. If she does move house, it will be because
of her growing family: 'We'd love somewhere bigger, but space - that's
the thing about London - it's just hard to find real estate.'
Nadja is used to much more expansive quarters: she was born in Germany
and brought up at the family's mountain retreat in the Tyrol in Austria,
a modest house with wooden beams, thick stone walls and cows in the front
yard.
Her father Helmut, now the president and chairman of Swarovski, would
come home "with pockets filled with crystals" for Nadja and
her older sister Vanessa, a gemmologist who now lives in Dallas with her
husband, Jorge Piedra, a professional baseball player. "We would
make our necklaces and bracelets from the beads and on the weekend he
would take us to the manufacturing plant," she explains.
A keen interest in crystals was her inheritance, but Nadja rebelled against
the constraints of her very traditional family. "As a child, I'd
always had
an incredible sense of connection to the product," she says, "but
as I reached the end of school, I realised that entailed a sort of nepotism."
After a few years at the school in Innsbruck that her father, uncles and
cousins attended, she transfered to a boarding school at Massachusetts,
then took a degree in Art History at Southern Methodist University in
Dallas, Texas. "I wanted to find my passion and follow that, to find
my strength." She took a business course at Sotheby's in New York
and workied for the art dealer Larry Gagosian, then for the ancient grande
dame of fashion PRs Eleanor Lambert, founder of the International Best-Dressed
List. She became known on the party scene for her unusually long feather
boa. Her wedding dress, for her marriage in Innsbruck in 2002, was sewn
with 15,000 crystals.
In 1995, while working to promote fashion labels such as Missoni and Valentino,
that she realised her experience could be employed to revamp the rather
tired image of her own family's company. Now vice president of international
communications, Nadja has spent the intervening years turning Swarovski
into a fashion brand.
The company has long had strong links with fashion: her grandfather Manfred
worked with Coco Chanel, Christian Dior and Schiaparelli. But even though
the ruby red slippers in the Wizard of Oz were encrusted with Swarovski,
as was the dress worn by Marilyn Monroe when she sang "Happy Birthday
Mr President", few consumers knew the brand.
The company's image was not assisted by the flamboyant pianist Liberace's
enthusiastic over-use of its product. "Liberace sat next to my grandfather
on a plane and my grandfather said, 'For you, free crystals for the rest
of your life!' Suddenly you had Liberace covering everything with crystals,
whether it was his coat, his Rolls-Royce, his piano… We felt a strong
need to get away from the 'Liberace' connotation," she says dryly.
So Nadja began working on initiatives, offering free crystals to cutting
edge designers. "We were trying to position crystal as a creative
ingredient for fashion designers, jewellery designers, interior designers
or architects." Philip Treacy and Alexander McQueen were the first
to take up the collaboration. "That's where the art started. These
designers are geniuses. They think out of the box."
Now the crystals are everywhere: Armani had metres of Swarovski's
most exclusive product, 'black diamond' crystal mesh, which looks like
a fabric made of caviar, hand-embroidered onto a dress for his Autumn/Winter
show and Swarovski sponsored Spring/Summer catwalk collections by Giles
Deacon, Basso & Brooke and more designers. Occasionally, the company
helps designers, such as Jonathan Saunders, financially - giving up to
£10,000 sponsorships. More usually, Swarovski donates crystals,
up to a value of £5,000. Hollywood was not slow to catch on: Nicole
Kidman's showgirl outfits in Moulin Rouge; Halle Berry with her flashing
belly button in Die Another Day; in the latest Bond outing, Swarovski
twinkles on the chandeliers of Casino Royale.
All this reinvention is remunerative. Turnover has doubled since 1998,
with the fashion arm of the business, once worth only 30% of this total,
now bringing in more like 70%, while Kristallwelten (Crystal World), the
Swarovski theme park in Wattens, is the second most visited tourist attraction
in Austria.
But although Nadja has all the trappings of a succesful life: the country
house (though she says it's 'more of a cottage', designer clothes, friends
like Zaha Hadid, Philip Treacy and Linda Bennet (of LK Bennet) and weekends
spent shooting chamois in Austria; one senses that fulfillment eludes
her. Perhaps this is because she is not on the family board which directs
the company's strategy. But luckily for them, selling crystal is clearly
in her bones.
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