Tory Burch's Survival Sketchbook

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

- DENIZ CAM

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.