Swarovski - A sparkling world of glass and coatings

 
Swarovski, a family owned business founded in 1895, is world market leader for cut "crystal glass". The company has perfected the industrial art of making, pre-forming and cutting glass, as well as applying coatings as a key element of product design. Our customers operate primarily in the fashion industry, in various segments like jewelry & watches, eyewear, apparel, shoes & accessories, as well as in architecture & lighting. This raises tough requirements regarding chemical and mechanical durability of the coatings. Adoption of many common coating technologies is limited by the special geometry of our products. The cuts of the stones are nowadays refined by computational optical engineering, to optimize sparkle and brilliance. Applied coatings must be geometrically conform to the substrates, in order to preserve the visual quality of the surface. In addition, single processing of the glass pieces is economically unfeasible, with the stone size ranging from 0.8 to 50+ mm, and the amount of stones to be coated being huge. In the talk, our long term history with coatings on glass will be explained, and why the importance of coatings on our products is steadily increasing.