Inside Tory Burch’s Covid survival sketchbook:
Amid a fashion apocalypse, one of the great entrepreneurial retailers takes us deep inside her battle to save her brand.and sleepless nights in March, Tory Burch’s impeccably decorated library in her red-brick home in the Hamptons officially became a war room. Pierre-Yves Roussel, her husband and the chief executive of her eponymous fashion company, claimed the patterned green couch.
ride along on their eight-month navigation of this apocalypse. They’ve had to improvise, shutting stores, rerouting supplies and revamping e-commerce efforts, all in the hope that the business, which generated almost $1.5 billion in revenue in 2019, with a profit marginestimated at 11%, could survive. “We didn’t know how we would be able to pivot and be agile,” Burch says. “The unknown was so difficult.
Then came troubles at home. In 2006, Burch initiated the end of her marriage; the divorce was finalized two years later. Legal trouble arrived in 2012, when Chris started his own fashion company, C. Wonder, which Burch claimed was informed too much by the premise of the brand they had launched together. They settled in early 2013, when Tory Burch LLC had $800 million in sales and 54 stores—andfirst declared her a billionaire.
The first shock hit her supply chain. “You have one thing that comes from Italy, and it’s a button, and then Italy is closed,” Burch explains. “So that button on that sweater prevents the whole piece from being able to get made.” When certain items couldn’t come together due to production delays, her team either changed their design or got rid of them entirely. Among the casualties: two embroidered dresses from India and Eastern Europe and shoes from Italy.
As with millions of entrepreneurs who saw their business upended, the balance between emotion and the need for cold logic amid the maelstrom proved a constant tension. Roussel had built an entire growth strategy around Asia, with at least 20 new stores planned in China through 2022.
Compared to the world she knew just a few months earlier, it was a surreal, wrenching process, made worse when a friend and coworker of 14 years succumbed to Covid-19 . “It was awful,” she says. “It was very hard, and it still is, and it will be for a very long time.” Burch also introduced virtual styling, which enables customers to make private video appointments to see different items in the store. Top clients get even higher touch. In late August, Burch—who has been actively engaging with Tory Burch fans on Instagram —joined 35 customers on a Zoom call and chatted with them about why they love the brand.
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