Last week, 144 debutantes in white gowns glided across the ballroom of the Vienna State Opera, opening the annual Vienna Opera Ball beneath five tiers of red velvet balconies and glittering chandeliers. As they waltzed to Johann Strauss’s “The Blue Danube”, each wore a gleaming swan-shaped tiara, designed by Swarovski.
For 70 years, the Austrian jewelry brand has remained principal partner of the Vienna Opera Ball, widely regarded as one of Europe’s oldest and most prestigious society events. In the days leading up to the event, Swarovski hosted international press and creators for an immersive program that featured waltz lessons for the likes of model Iris Law and TikTokers Brooke Monk and Benji Krol, followed by a dinner at the Baroque Palais Liechtenstein. Last year, the activation drove significant media attention, leading to a 25% global sales uplift compared to the previous week (and 255% growth in the DACH market — Germany, Austria, and Switzerland), according to the company.
“What does the partnership bring? It’s very simple: it creates economic value and cultural capital,” says Swarovski CEO Alexis Nasard on the morning of the ball. We’re sitting in a suite at the famous Hotel Sacher, directly opposite the Vienna State Opera.
The event offers a window into a broader transformation underway at Swarovski. In 2020, the jewelry brand appointed its first global creative director, Giovanna Engelbert, who started her career as a stylist, worked under Anna Dello Russo and Franca Sozzani at Vogue Italia, and had been working with Swarovski on its business-to-business division (which supplies crystals to other brands) since 2016. Her tenure has brought a louder, more fashion-centric visual identity that has helped reposition the brand within contemporary culture. Then, in 2022, Nasard was appointed as CEO.
Nasard has been reshaping the brand since, under a strategy called Luxignite, and repositioning it not as a traditional luxury house, but as what he calls “pop luxury” — a mix of heritage, zeitgeist appeal, creativity, price point, and attitude. “We’re not dusty or old-fashioned. We’re Met Gala, we’re Ariana Grande, we’re Wicked, we’re the Golden Globes — we’re popular,” he says. “Pop luxury is a philosophy that what luxury ultimately brings to the customer is a feeling of joy and self-worth. It’s different from accessible luxury, because that’s just pricing — and frankly, you will find 100 players at various price points, so I find that definition limiting.”
The repositioning comes at a pivotal moment for Swarovski. Following several years of restructuring — including store network shifts and a rethink of its product architecture — the company has returned to growth, but is still working to expand margins and cement its place within an increasingly polarized jewelry market. The aim is to build what Nasard describes as cultural capital that translates into economic value — ensuring brand heat ultimately supports commercial performance.
Resetting the business
If pop luxury defines the vision, Nasard is clear that execution must be equally disciplined. A key priority since his arrival has been rebuilding profitability, particularly after years of margin pressure. “The challenge for Swarovski is how we continue with a tight equilibrium between aggressive growth and margin expansion in a difficult environment,” he says. “Most of our competitors already have healthy margins, so they can invest back into more growth. But I can’t do that, so we don’t have the luxury of wastage. If I’m going to invest in the Vienna Opera Ball, I’d better be damn sure it’s going to pay out.”
Collaborations like the Opera Ball are evaluated against three criteria: cultural association, relative scale, and return on investment. “If someone is much smaller than us, they don’t bring value. If they’re much bigger, we become a prop,” he says. The brand is equally deliberate about where it chooses not to play. “I don’t have money to waste. Take sports: what is our natural association? Do you know how many brands are associated with the Olympics?”
He applies the same pragmatism to retail. Swarovski’s earlier attempts to engineer scarcity through store closures ultimately eroded scale. “A hyper-rationalized store network for a brand that is two-thirds impulse purchase was damaging to scale,” says Nasard. “You don’t say to your boyfriend, ‘Let’s book an appointment with Swarovski in May’ — you might do that with Van Cleef Arpels, but we recognize with humility that we are still impulse, so ubiquity is more important.”
Roughly two-thirds of sales come from Swarovski’s own stores, with around 80% of that generated in bricks-and-mortar locations. Even store design reflects the brand’s positioning: rather than traditional category navigation, merchandising is organized around color and aesthetic, encouraging layering and discovery in a way that mirrors Swarovski’s maximalist styling codes. Meanwhile, Nasard is adamant e-commerce should mirror the in-store experience rather than becoming a discount outlet.
Geography is also an important variable. The US is Swarovski’s largest market, making up 19% of sales, while Europe — which accounts for around 45% of sales — remains a bedrock, with record years in markets including the UK, Germany and Switzerland, Nasard says. Japan is one of Swarovski’s fastest-growing markets, consistently delivering double-digit growth, while China remains a work in progress. “We haven’t cracked it yet,” he admits.
Financially, the reset is beginning to show through. In 2024, the company posted 8% like-for-like revenue growth, reaching €1.9 billion with EBITDA up 14% and operating profit returning to positive for the first time in five years (2025 results will be published next month). Growth has been driven equally by a mix of higher volumes, pricing, and customers trading up, according to Nasard. Over the next two years, Nasard plans to double down on core markets including the US, Europe and Japan, expand newer categories such as charms, and improve productivity, partly through AI.
Luxury at every price
Few brands operate on such a wide pricing spectrum as Swarovski: entry-level charms start at €59, and fashion pieces crafted with crystal can go up to €1,200, while fine jewelry (made from Swarovski lab-grown diamonds) range from €500 to €250,000. Nasard frames that breadth as central to pop luxury — one of the ways Swarovski aims to feel culturally current while remaining a business of scale.
To manage that breadth, Swarovski has introduced a structured strategy spanning low, mid and high-complexity pieces, each governed by distinct rules around distribution and promotions. “We wanted to create a taxonomy that not only encompasses the degree of complexity in the products, but also the price points,” Nasard explains. “It’s a very systematic model to preserve scale while building an image.” Increasingly, that system is supported by advanced analytics, including AI models to optimize pricing and promotional decisions across a dense SKU base.
Nasard stresses that the “secret recipe” for selling at such a range of price points is that the customer is very different on either end. Today, two-thirds (66%) of Swarovski buyers are millennials or Gen Zs — up from 57% four years ago — though higher-ticket pieces still attract a more traditional luxury clientele. Beyond jewelry, Swarovski’s crystal figurines bring in distinct buyer groups, from collectors (who can join Swarovski’s members club, Crystal Society, to receive gifts, free repairs, and limited-edition products) to fans of licensed characters, to gift-givers — a category Nasard says swells around the holidays, when the brand’s festive ornament is a bestseller.
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Crucially, he argues, value perception strengthens as prices rise. “The higher up you go, the more value you get when you compare it to other alternatives,” says Nasard. At entry levels, consumers can find similar styles elsewhere. But at the top end, Swarovski often sits well below comparable offers. “The next best alternative is still 10, 15, 20 times more expensive. No one else is making pieces like that at this price.”
His definition of value deliberately avoids affordability. “When people talk about value, they start thinking it’s about affordability. But no, value has nothing to do with affordability,” Nasard says. Instead, he defines value as a ratio of joy-to-price. “No customer thinks they’re stupid. Nobody makes a purchase they don’t think is worth it for them. If I go tomorrow and buy a £500,000 Bugatti, I think it’s worth it for me,” he says. “Every customer looks for value — the luxury CEOs who forgot that paid a dear price for it.”
In a market where consumer confidence is uneven, he argues that matters more than ever. “Even though there’s no economic recession, there’s a K-shaped economy where the affluent are getting more affluent, the middle class not so much, and lower classes much less. That’s affecting traffic, which is why we’ve been prudent on not getting too greedy with pricing,” he says.
Ultimately, Nasard’s ambition is to prove Swarovski can be both broad and credible. “Our vision is to be the ‘pop’ icon of luxury, growing faster than the industry, with industry-standard margins or more, and giving every customer a moment of joy every day.”
