How Jewelry Makers Finally Cracked the Battery Problem for Wearables
How Jewelry Makers (Not A Tech Company) Finally Cracked The Battery Problem For Wearables
In 2009, not long after Apple unveiled its first iPhone, the Swarovski jewelry company launched a crystal-encrusted LED watch. It was pretty and nothing like the technology being stuffed into today’s smart watches but it did suffer from a problem that continues to beset many of them. The battery life was awful. It had to be charged at least once a day. Joan Ng, a vice president of marketing for Swarovski whose job included pushing innovative jewelry designs, told the company’s research and development team in Austria that they had a problem. How could they avoid charging the watch every day? It turned out the answer was right under their noses: crystals.
The ability of crystals to concentrate light make them perfect conduits for charging solar panels that are placed at strategic angles underneath.
Over the next five years, Swarovski’s R&D team worked on developing new, energy harvesting crystals that they could integrate into the firm’s LED watches. Then wearables started to be a thing in 2013 and Ng realised Swarovski’s crystals could power more than just a tiny electronic display, but more complex processors and components.

In 2014 her team carried out a survey of women at a university in Switzerland and asked them about activity trackers. Would they wear them as readily as they did watches? Only 27% said they were interested in buying one, but the number jumped to 50% if they could get trackers that looked stylish.
When it comes to building wearable technology, other tech companies have been “trying to think like a man,” says Ng from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where Swarovski is displaying its solar-powered prototype for the first time. “Our company targets women and we know what women want.”

It’s said that our love of convenience is the main driver of innovation, and that was partly the case for Swarovski. Not only did the women in Swarovski's survey want a stylish activity tracker, they wanted one that was simple and easy to charge. It was more important to them than extra applications and features.
Ng’s team put two and two together and ditched the LED watch idea. Instead they worked on applying their nascent, energy-harvesting crystal technology to an activity tracker.
Not long after the survey in Aug. 2013, one of Ng’s team members bumped into Sonny Vu, the founder and CEO of Misfit at a wearable tech summit in New York. Vu hadn’t even launched the original Misfit Shine yet but when he showed her colleague the sleek-looking prototype the two companies embarked on a partnership.
Over the next 17 months Misfit and Swarovski’s R&D teams worked together across the Atlantic to embed the Shine’s components with its energy-harvesting blue crustal; blue, they say, because that's the best color for efficiently collecting light.

Solar panels typically need perpendicular light to charge their cells and crystals are among the rare materials that can do that. Swarovski, which is "in the business if light," according to Ng, cut its crystals to bend and capture the light to most effectively hit a solar panel. The crystal is essential to the renewable tech, and there’s no need for a battery. Wearers just have to make sure to expose their band to 10-15 minutes of sunlight each day, or “strong indoor light,” Ng says. Swarovski hasn’t put a price point on the solar-powered Swarovski Shine yet.
“I remember when we first mentioned it to other people, no one would believe we had developed this technology,” says Ng.
You can’t blame them. Battery life has been one of the biggest headaches for makers of wearable gadgets in Silicon Valley. Apple didn’t even mention battery life when it announced the Apple Watch late last year. It has reportedly been experimenting with solar charging for its smart watch too but has yet to reveal anything. It helps that the Swarovski Shine doesn’t have a touch screen display and so doesn’t chug anywhere near as much power as the Apple Watch or the Samsung Gear.
But the product is still a landmark for wearable tech which others may well try to emulate, despite coming from a surprisingly un-techie source.
Ng says Swarovski has no other plans to partner with other wearable tech makers just yet. “We’ve been very happy with Misfit. They’re a very friendly and down-to-earth company,” she says, adding, “I’m sure after this week we will attract a lot other companies who are interested in discussions, but we want to make baby steps and make sure we have the perfect collection.”