Amid a luxury fashion apocalypse, one of the century's greatest entrepreneurial retailers—and one of America's richest self-made women—brought us deep inside the battle to save her brand
After seven long days 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 chief executive of her eponymous fashion company, claimed the patterned green couch. Across from him, Burch—the company chairman, clad in leggings—took the desk by the window overlooking their seven acres. The couple barely stepped outside the room for three weeks.
“One day went into the next, and one week went into the next,” says Burch, who left her Park Avenue apartment with a small suitcase on March 6, thinking a quarantine would not last long. “I don’t think we had a break for a solid month. It was a very scary time—2008 happened, and we saw our business change overnight. But this was nothing like 2008. This was much, much worse.”
Luxury fashion is fickle even in the best of times. The coronavirus has been an especially virulent pest. Stores around the globe shut down amid stay-at-home regulations. Chinese travellers—whose purchases account for some 30 percent of luxury-goods sales in Europe and North America—put away their travel bags. J Crew, Neiman Marcus and Brooks Brothers all filed for bankruptcy. Revenues at Gucci parent Kering and LVMH, Roussel’s former employer, fell around 40 percent in the second quarter. Ralph Lauren sales tumbled by two-thirds.
Burch and Roussel realised quickly how dire the situation was. Within weeks, they were closing many of their 315 Tory Burch stores across the globe, furloughing most of their retail employees and shelving expansion plans, and coping with a longtime employee’s death from Covid-19. They then began formulating new plans to make sure Tory Burch LLC didn’t unravel.
Throughout this disruptive moment for the world, for business and for retail, Burch and Roussel let Forbes ride along on their eight-month navigation of this apocalypse. They’ve had to improvise, shutting stores, rerouting supplies and revamping ecommerce efforts, all in the hope that the business, which generated almost $1.5 billion in revenue in 2019, with a profit margin Forbes estimated at 11 percent, could survive. “We didn’t know how we would be able to pivot and be agile,” Burch says. “The unknown was so difficult.”
(This story appears in the 29 January, 2021 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)