One can’t help having certain expectations about Nadja Swarovski, the woman who, as it were, crystallised the world. In the flesh, will she be all brittle ice queen?

Well, no, not at all. Swarovski’s vice-president of communications and heiress to a billion-dollar fortune is as nice and real-life as can be. She’s apologetic, too, when we meet at her airy, lime-green-carpeted offices in Conduit Street, London. Apologetic because she’s feeling just a little “all over the place” at the moment. Having just returned from the company’s Austrian HQ, she is about to jet off to America to host the genius Crystal Palace exhibition she established in 2002 (a show where designers such as Ron Arad and Zaha Hadid create state-of-the-art, one-off chandeliers from Swarovski crystals) at Design Miami, as main sponsor of the high-profile event. There’s the big move, too. In a couple of weeks, she and her team are changing offices for a much larger space, where all those magnificent chandeliers that have been commissioned over the years can be displayed. “It makes me cry, thinking of the way they’ve always had to go into storage,” Swarovski says. All this while she is also juggling the demands of being a mother to three children below the age of four — the youngest born less than a year ago. “Oh, don’t,” she wails. “It is so hard, leaving them when they’re tiny.” It is hard, too, after the third, to get one’s figure back. “Look,” she says, pinching a millimetre of skin above her waistband, “I can’t fit into any of my clothes. Don’t even look at what I’m wearing. It’s Friday, I’ve cancelled dinner tonight; this is hang-out gear you’ve got me in today.”

Yeah, right. That’s not what her MaxMara jacket and perfect blonde ponytail seem to say. But then, as the woman who has single-handedly turned a company best known for its cutesy animal figurines into one of the world’s hottest luxury brands, as the woman without whose financial support designers such as Erdem, Christopher Kane and Giles Deacon might not be in business, does Swarovski, 37, know what “hanging out” means any more? “Yeah, well,” she shrugs with a helpless smile, “with your own business, you can’t stop, can you? But I need to sleep. I’ve realised sleep is such a pivotal thing. The most challenging job, surely, must be as a maternity nurse.”

It was 1995 when Swarovski — who was brought up with her sister, Vanessa, in the Tyrolean Alps, and who went to college in America — joined the company’s marketing division. Having been born into a family described as the “Rockefellers of Austria”, she had always steered clear of becoming part of the family firm “out of self-protection, because I didn’t want it to be perceived as nepotistic”. As a child, however, she had routinely discussed the business with her father, Helmut (current president and chairman of Swarovski), at the dinner table. After a stint working for the American fashion doyenne Eleanor Lambert (creator of the prestigious Best Dressed List and, just as important, the person who put classic labels such as Missoni and Valentino back into the spotlight), she felt compelled to do the same with the profitable but largely anonymous family company — compelled, as she has put it before, “to make people think of the bead, not the swan”.

Thirteen years later, the arm of the company that sells crystals to businesses has more than doubled in size, overtaking the division that produces those kitschy swans and now accounting for more than 50% of Swarovski’s annual £1.6 billion in sales. “The quality was always there,” she says, in her Teutonic- inflected American accent. “Our crystals were used for Dorothy’s red slippers, for Marilyn Monroe’s gown when she stepped out of that birthday cake — I just had to let people know about it.”

A life of leisure was never on the cards for Swarovski. That’s partly to do with family pride — “If it’s my name on the product, it better be good” — partly to do with her own relentlessly positive attitude, and partly because of her personal philosophy that we all have to live our lives to their fullest potential, despite any obstacles. By obstacles, read the fact that, despite her extraordinary effect within the male-dominated company, she is yet to be made a CEO. Then there were the armed robbers who held her up in her Cadogan Square apartment three years ago, when she was pregnant with her second child, Thalia, stealing all the jewellery from her safe. “They didn’t do anything to me,” she says simply, “maybe because I was pregnant. I guess what it taught me was that the material is pretty immaterial.”

That ferociously glass-half-full mentality has been growing ever since. “If you don’t get out of your comfort zone, you’ll always have fear. But we have the ability to disown fear, and I think that’s important when you have kids, because fear is so contagious. I don’t want my kids growing up scared of everything.”

There is something evangelical about Swarovski’s manner; evangelical, and, well, contagious. But we’ll have to talk about her ideas another time. The British Fashion Awards, which Swarovski has sponsored for the past three years, loom large, as does the launch of the five-metre Ingo Maurer crystal snowflake that has been strung up between Harvey Nicks and the Mandarin Oriental on Knightsbridge. And let’s not forget the party to organise for her son Rigby.

“It’s funny,” she says, flaring those aristocratic nostrils and stifling a yawn (it wasn’t the baby, it was Rigby who kept her up last night). “I used to be one of those moms who had to do everything, who had to put the sprinkles on the cupcakes, who did weekends on her own — you know, the washing with the rubber gloves on. After the third child, I’m, like, ‘Come on in and help me out.’ And what’s bad about having a nanny at the weekend if you can? We wanted it all and now we’ve got it, we have to figure out how to do it best. Guilt, I have come to realise, is the most useless emotion in the world.”

Swarovski Crystal Palace will exhibit new work by Ross Lovegrove at Design Miami, December 3-6; swarovskisparkles.com

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