Swarovski has crystal-clear vision for Chinese market

At the exhibition, Chinese designer Liu Feng created an installation known as Milky Way, which uses a mountain of crystals to represent refracted memory in the digital age. "It shows the function of the crystal as a lens if you light it from different angles," Swarovski says.

Beijing-based furniture designer Song Tao embedded crystals in wood and bamboo in a piece known as The Story of Time, which aims to reflect the memory of birth, growth and death.

In April this year, Swarovski also presented a new installation to coincide with Art Basel in Hong Kong.

Entitled Prologue, it is a giant 4-meter outdoor sculpture, holding more than 8,000 Swarovski crystals, by London-based design duo Patrik Fredrikson and Ian Stallard. The installation plays with natural light by transforming and transmuting its environment throughout the day.

Last year Swarovski took the fashion show Runway Rocks to Shanghai in collaboration with Lane Crawford. Runway Rocks was a fashion show Swarovski originally staged in London a decade ago.

"At Runway Rocks, we got Asian designers to show their ultimate catwalk piece, to celebrate the industry and to get people to think outside of the box," says Swarovski.

She was born in Germany in 1970. She joined Swarovski in 1995, starting her career in Hong Kong, where she stayed until 1997. She says she chose Hong Kong for its fast flow and cando attitude.

"In 1992 I visited the Chinese mainland with my father on a business trip. I don't know when and how but I decided I will live there. Three years later I figured out how to live there," she says.

Not only did she enjoy living in Hong Kong, but the city's distance from Swarovski's home market also gave her an opportunity to see the business from a holistic perspective, or a "bird's eye view" in her own words.

"There's so much energy and so much to be done. Modernization was on the way, and everyone had so much to do," she recalls.

At Swarovski, she is known for bringing a fashion focus to the brand, which started merely as a supplier of crystal, with its best-selling consumer products being cute crystal animal figurines. She brought about this change by introducing a series of collaborations with well-known fashion designers, famously with Alexander McQueen, but also Philip Treacy, Hussein Chalayan and Giles Deacon.

"I just put the crystals in his hands and let his imagination go wild," she recalls of the collaboration with McQueen.

"In the late 1990s, people thought crystals are just clear and bling, but actually we have so many shapes and colors of crystals, and that really came through with the work of McQueen," she says.