When Tory Burch opens a new Soho store next month, it will mark a departure from the retro preppy vibe that made her name. Her brand has survived the pandemic with her husband, Pierre- Yves Roussel, at the helm—will real-life shopping take it to the next level?
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Tory Burch’s decorative T hardware on ballet flats and leather handbags is as well known among her fashion fans as the Golden Arches are to french fry lovers. But ever since she co-founded her namesake brand in 2004, she has refused to go all-in, even as other brands made logos a key part of their strategy. Then this past February—mid-pandemic—she put out tote bags, sneakers and hats slathered in head-to-head Ts enclosed in circles. Burch still refuses to call it a logo line. It’s officially the T Monogram collection.
“I wasn’t against logo bags,” says Burch, 55, who sees her original Ts on shoe buckles and handbags as an emblem rather than a logo. Vocabulary aside, it took her, she says, two years to perfect the jacquard motif, It is a similar sort of repeat pattern to the interlocking LV’s or double G’s that have fueled the profits of luxury brands Louis Vuitton and Gucci, but announces the wearer as a proud Tory gal. The risk, of course, is that a line awash in logos could cheapen the brand’s image—a fate previously suffered by American brands Michael Kors and Coach.
“I don’t want to say I’m not a logo person because there’s different sides to me, but it’s not for me,” Burch says. “It was never about, Oh I have to wear a certain label.”
After overcoming her personal doubts, Burch deployed a strategy in keeping with each new initiative since she launched the brand 17 years ago: to offer luxurious but affordable fashions. Burch is pinning her hopes on matching the materials and workmanship of a European luxury brand while employing American-style cost efficiencies—manufacturing in Portugal, Spain and Vietnam, for instance, rather than France. A pair of logo Gucci espadrille slides will set you back $520, while you would lay down $198 for the T Monogram pair.
Burch’s eponymous company has held steadfast to maintaining this American-price- Euro-luxury differential while conservatively navigating two global crises—the 2008 financial crash and the 2020 pandemic—profitable and largely unencumbered by debt, they say. She spent much of the past year retrenching amid temporary store closures and employee furloughs, while at the same time planning an evolution into a global brand that uses upgraded materials and designs. Tory Burch also plans aggressive investments in digital and supply-chain technology. With much of the world emerging from the pandemic, Burch will also return to expanding her retail store network—including an intended 60 new stores in China—beginning in August with a new flagship at 151 Mercer Street in New York City’s Soho neighborhood. It announces her new, less preppy, more sophisticated aesthetic.
“I don’t want to take any victory laps,” Burch says. “There’s always something around the corner.... [But] I’m surprised at the recovery of the business.”
The Mercer store suggests how Burch is evolving personally, creatively and corporately. She is nearly two decades older than when she conceived the business, with a 2004 store opening on Elizabeth Street followed by an exclusive wholesale launch at Bergdorf Goodman. At the time, she called the label Tory by TRB (for her initials—Tory Robinson Burch), which she soon saw as misguided. “It’s the worst name. Everyone’s calling it Tory Burch. What is wrong with you?” the late jewelry designer Kenneth Jay Lane told her over dinner, she says.
“There hasn’t been in the last couple of decades an American brand that has launched that successfully,” says the luxury industry consultant Robert Burke. “The other designers of that time period were really going after European aesthetics.... Tory’s appeal is what’s always been appealing...about American sportswear: It’s uncomplicated. It’s easy.... She was just much more focused on appealing to a real woman.”
A previous generation of American fashion leaders, including Calvin Klein and Donna Karan, sold their companies and watched their namesake labels gradually reduced to shopping outlet brands. Michael Kors is now owned by Capri Holdings, which also owns Versace and Jimmy Choo. A younger generation of designers that includes Jason Wu, Alexander Wang, and Joseph Altuzarra hasn’t grown the retail and digital networks necessary to dominate fashion the way their predecessors did. That leaves Ralph Lauren —where Burch worked in in communications and advertising in the early 1990s—as arguably Tory Burch’s only real peer as a large American luxury brand whose designer is still in control, though the publicly traded Ralph Lauren Corp. revenues, $6.2 billion in fiscal year 2020, dwarf Tory Burch’s, which are expected to top $1.5 billion in 2021, according to people familiar with the company.
“It’s very easy to move around with the flavor du jour” as a designer, says Vera Wang, who has known Burch since she graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in art history. “The harder thing to do is to stay in your lane and make it relevant. That’s what the biggest houses have always done.”
Wang deconstructs the formula that built Tory Burch as well as her own brand: “You have to have one item that works. Chanel had that cardigan jacket.... With Armani it was very much soft suiting, soft tailoring.... Ralph Lauren had the polo shirt and Americana.... Calvin Klein made America sexy.... I’m known for bridal,” Wang says. “And Tory started with the tunic and moved on with that insane ballet slipper where hardware became extremely visible and very important.”
Reva Robinson, Burch’s mom, for whom the flats were named, has been asked to autograph the shoes, millions of which were once sold for $195 each but have since been discontinued. (In their place are a handful of best-selling bags and shoes such as the slightly sleeker $228 Minnie travel ballet flat, while the original Revas still have asking prices on eBay that can top $250.)
The Mercer Street store is a similarly sleeker vision of Burch’s world. Gone is the familiar bold orange door and the directionally preppy David Hicks–inspired decor. In its place will be travertine floors and muted oak, rattan and wicker. The store will showcase the work of women artists, notably a chandelier, sconces and painted handrails by the New York artist Francesca DiMattio.
To celebrate the local community as it emerges from the pandemic, Burch is staging an exhibition at the Mercer store in partnership with the International Center of Photography—called Tory Burch x ICP: A “New” New York—to showcase work from female alumni of the school.
Shoppers at the Mercer store will be greeted by a ceiling hung with baskets and caning, an airy theme for a store designed with Gwenaël Nicolas, a French Tokyo-based designer and co-founder of architecture and design firm Curiosity.
Nicolas is known for minimalist light-filled spaces such as Uniqlo’s Shinjuku, Tokyo, megastore, as well as retail spaces for Fendi, Louis Vuitton and collaborations with Issey Miyake. With Burch, he has created a combination of artsy furnishings and comfort that she hopes will feel like walking into a living room. It’s an eclectic high-low mashup of a sitting room, which in Burch’s envisioning generally involves furnishings one might wish to dive into for a cozy nap.
Burch became acquainted with Nicolas through her husband, Pierre-Yves Roussel, who had met him when Roussel, also 55, a former McKinsey partner, served as chief executive of LVMH’s fashion group in Paris.
Burch with Pierre-Yves Roussel, her husband and the ceo of her brand since 2019. “The biggest impact that I can have is to give Tory time to focus on creativity,” he says, adding, “Our business model is actually a European luxury business model.”
Burch with Pierre-Yves Roussel, her husband and the ceo of her brand since 2019. “The biggest impact that I can have is to give Tory time to focus on creativity,” he says, adding, “Our business model is actually a European luxury business model.” Brady Bunch: The happily-ever-after ending sees the couple and their nine children and stepchildren jet-setting between their Manhattan office and homes on New York’s Upper East Side, and Long Island, Normandy and Antigua.
Roussel took over the CEO duties at Tory Burch nearly three years ago, and for the past year or more, Burch has been relating her pleasure at having time to focus on creative direction. She no longer has to attend inventory control meetings or manage kinks in the supply chain, her team members note, so she’s spending more time thinking about designs and fabrics. “I’m open to being a little more vulnerable.... I’m showing a bit more of a personal side,” she says. “I mean, having Pierre-Yves on board has changed everything.”
“I trust his insights, deeply, and I think that’s something I’ve never had.... [He] has had all of this experience building brands in Europe at LVMH for [nearly] 16 years. But I think we fundamentally see things similarly, from the obsession we have with protecting our company with this concept of quality, and evolution, and this idea of American luxury and what that could be.”
Robinson says she’s noted a change in her daughter, the youngest of four and the only girl. “I see her much softer lately, and calmer and in control, but gently,” Robinson says, adding, “She been like a champion to our family.”
The well-connected Burch has been married three times—and briefly dated Lance Armstrong—but her relationship with Roussel began after a business query. They met in Paris over breakfast with investment bankers in 2012. Roussel, on behalf of LVMH, was interested in investing in her company. He followed up the meeting with a message, to which she never responded. “I missed his email,” she says.
A year later, she phoned to warn Roussel that he might be deposed in a lawsuit between Burch and her ex-husband, Chris Burch, as they tussled over the valuation of the company they’d started together. That call rekindled LVMH’s interest, leading to a meeting with LVMH CEO and chairman Bernard Arnault. Ultimately, nothing came of those talks but a friendship that turned romantic. “It was a long friendship,” says Burch. “I mean, he’s the love of my life.”
(The Burches, who have three sons together, settled their legal disputes in 2013. “Chris and I are good friends now,” she says. “He told me it was a 10-year misunderstanding.” Two of her three stepdaughters with Burch work with her at the brand.)
Roussel has until now kept largely to the background, leaving Burch to speak for the company. He reports to the board of directors, which includes himself, Burch, Isen and a who’s-who list of tech, investment and media executives including banker Byron Trott, CEO of BDT Capital Partners and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Roussel says he sees his role much like that of Europe’s luxury-house CEOs: Taking care of the supply chain, inventory, pricing, merchandising, hiring and myriad other operations so the designer can focus on creating new collections. “The biggest impact that I can have is to give Tory time to focus on creativity,” he says.
With more time to spend in the design studio, Burch’s ready-to-wear designs have taken a more sophisticated and rather minimalist turn in recent collections. Her fall collection included a plethora of layered suiting, including a gamine corduroy trouser suit, but nary an embroidered tunic. For her elevated Lee Radziwill collection of bags, which cost about $500 to $1,600, Burch ferreted out Italian suede for one version and interpreted basket weave in hand-woven leather on another, relying on tanneries throughout Europe and Asia, including Germany, Spain and South Korea.
There are several forebears of the Burch-Roussel-style relationship in fashion history— Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé prime among them. But Burch isn’t relinquishing the reins. She remains executive chairman as well as chief creative officer of the privately held company.
Roussel says his biggest surprise upon joining the brand was the sheer amount of cash Burch had been investing in digital technology, which put her company well ahead of brands he was familiar with. “It was two to three times more...than I’d seen before” at LVMH, Roussel says, in “absolute number[s] and the percentage” of revenues. “I came from a world where the bigger investment was in the stores and the digital was very low in terms of investment.”
He was also shocked, pleasantly, to find the company operated its own distribution center near Atlanta. “I never had that. Most of the supply chain was outsourced,” Roussel says.
“The fact is that when you own it, you can build it into the system so it’s much more integrated. During the pandemic, we never closed our warehouse.”
It’s this sort of efficiency that Roussel and Burch are now doubling down on as they guide the brand toward its third decade. They can move production around the world in response to global economic shifts, speed products to market and build a base of replenishable always-in-demand products. Some are in the T Monogram line, which means: Keep the jacquard materials and hardware on hand to quickly respond to sales trends. “The beauty of that is that you never know which style is going to be the best seller,” says Roussel. “So you can do manufacturing based on demand.”
“I’m open to being a little more vulnerable. I’m showing a bit more of a personal side,” says Burch. Hair, Michael Johnson. Makeup, Berta Camal.
Burch has avoided expansion moves that her American counterpart designers have used in pursuit of growth. From her brand’s beginning, she limited wholesale, keeping most distribution direct-to-consumer via her own stores, and later online. She has no plans to develop an outlet channel—and the discounted product array that entails—so she remains focussed on selling at full price. (Burch does have a home line with tablewares and linens, a sunscreen collaboration with Shiseido, jewelry and fragrances.)
A rare misstep was the spin-off of the Tory Sport activewear line with its own separate brand and stores, but Burch quickly switched gears. Tory Sport is now a direct-to- consumer business that sells entirely online.
Roussel, meanwhile, insists he’s not trying to replicate what he did at LVMH, where he oversaw the fashion group, guiding strategy and recruiting designers including Jonathan Anderson at Loewe. But he has helped bring in digital firepower, like Bindu Shah, who they recruited away from LVMH’s Sephora to serve as chief marketing officer and head of digital.
“It’s not just raising pricing. It’s coming up with products that are stronger, [whose] quality is even better,” says Roussel, who sees a sweet spot for the brand. “We’re not trying to be at that European luxury price point,” he says.
“Our business model is actually a European luxury business model,” he adds. “And this is where the store plays a very critical role.” One of his primary tasks in the next several years is finding sites to double the store footprint in China.
To that end, he’s working with Robert Isen, Burch’s older half-brother and the company’s president of corporate development and chief legal officer. “Tory’s a bigger risk taker than I am,” Isen says. “I wouldn’t say it’s aggressive growth. That’s something we would eschew. [It’s] patient growth.... The brand, for us, is really the important thing.”
“This is not a company. It’s a family,” says Reva Robinson.
It was Roussel who pressed Burch to move forward with the T Monogram collection. He doesn’t mind calling it “logo” but says he understands her hesitation. “Tory—her name is on the door. She doesn’t want to [be] a logo.”