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. PierreYves Roussel, her husband and the 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 travelers — whose purchases account for some 30% 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% in the second quarter. Ralph Lauren sales tumbled by two-thirds.

Burch and Roussel realized 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.