It’s a relationship that’s clearly working.
With help from husband and chief executive officer Pierre-Yves Roussel, Tory Burch has executed a brand transformation, lifting her two-decade-old, logo-led, preppy sportswear business into the luxury realm with a new design vision, elevated craft and directional accessories to capture the fashion spotlight again.
“I’m definitely having more fun,” said Burch, WWD’s 2024 Women’s Designer of the Year. “I learned on the job. I learned how to be a designer and run the business. But what I realized along the way is that my passion was the creative process. And really, in the beginning, I didn’t even think of myself as a designer. And I would say, I’ve paid my dues and I’ve learned how to be a designer. And I love it. I think that it’s the most exciting profession. I love our industry.”
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Roussel joined the company in 2019 from LVMH Fashion Group, where he was chairman and CEO, freeing Burch from executive responsibilities to focus on the creative. But she was already laying the groundwork for the reset before that, as the two discussed in a conversation that opened the 2024 WWD Apparel & Retail CEO Summit.
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“I was dying to change,” she said. “I realized that when people started to say things to me like, ‘That’s not on brand,’ I thought, ‘I don’t even know what’s on brand, what is on brand?’ I realized that we had this great business, for the first 10 years of this crazy growth, and then I also realized it got away from me a little bit. And even the idea of a logo, I wanted to start pulling it back. It wasn’t a personal reflection of how I saw women today.”
In 2015, she started the Tory Sport collection, which put her in a more experimental design mindset, and in 2018 she added an atelier to her New York headquarters, hired her stepdaughter Pookie Burch (formerly the designer of Trademark) as associate creative director and started working with stylist Brian Molloy to heighten the brand.
Bringing on Roussel took more finessing.
“I had to marry him to get him to come be CEO,” Burch joked during their conversation with Fairchild Media’s chief content officer Jim Fallon.
“When he came, everyone said, was it hard to give up the CEO role? And it was the easiest thing I’ve ever done. I ran the company for 14 years, and when Pierre-Yves came on board, it just changed everything. I spent 100 percent of my time on the creative process. He came six months before COVID-19, so we had some work to do getting through that, but it just gave me the ability to reset. And my first collection was the Shaker collection, and that was really the palette cleanser,” she said of spring 2021.
In many ways, she and Roussel complement each other, they shared of their communication style and work-life balance.
“It’s been very organic, let’s start with the fact that Tory has built a company, so she understand the business very well. And obviously she’s brilliant on the creative. So for me as a CEO, working with her, it’s very easy. You should understand both sides,” Roussel said. “When it comes to personal things, we are very passionate about what we do, and when we don’t feel talking about it, we just say it.”
“Sometimes, at seven in the morning, I’m like, no,” Burch interjected. “And we’re very different. I’m an idea a minute; he’s very thoughtful, methodical and takes his time.”
“I think the real challenge is the pace at which you change,” he said. “And if you’re going too fast, you lose a lot of your customer.…As a private company with the scale that we have, we have to be careful. But at the same time, if you don’t change, then you’re taking a risk without even knowing it.
Roussel brought experience from the legacy and heritage of the European luxury market to the $2 billion, 20-year-old American brand.
“What we’ve done in the last five, six years is to organize the company for the next level given the scale and the size that we have…and to combine the new creative journey of Tory’s evolution,” he explained. “The great thing is that I didn’t have to worry about protecting the DNA…because she really is the brand,” he said, drawing differentiation between his previous role at LVMH working with brands whose namesakes are no longer involved.
“We also had to bring along the technical capabilities and craft around product, which in the U.S ecosystem is not as easy as in Europe. We actually hired people from the Garment District and it was probably the last well of talent that existed in New York, of people that had been around and really had that craft,” he said of staffing the Brooklyn atelier to elevate design and quality.
In terms of communicating the brand evolution through marketing and product, the pair agreed they are still mid-transformation.
“Because we have these iconic products that have been around for a while, I want to reinvigorate them and rethink them,” said Burch, mentioning the Reva logo ballet flat, named after her mother, that powered the business’ growth in the beginning. “My mother said, ‘They shelved me. They put me on a shelf,'” she joked of how she pulled back production of the much-copied style for a time before remixing it with a new silhouette and logo and reviving it for the spring 2025 collection.
“She was really happy we brought her back.”
“Innovation is critical,” Roussel agreed. “We have iconic product, like other brands have iconic product, and work continuously to make it better. I think when you get into a position where you keep the same product, and you’ve increased the price three times or four times inflation, the customers say is there a disconnect here? When you buy the iPhone 16, you expect it’s better than the 15 or the 14. Even bringing sustainability to it, we’ve redesigned one of our bags using an alternative leather, so there’s a lot of ways of improving on iconic product that you keep, the so called carryover, and bringing additional value.”
He also highlighted the retail transformation evidenced in the Mercer Street store in New York, the pop-up shops around the Walter Schels’ cat prints for the resort 2024 collection, and the redesigned Rodeo Drive store opening next year as key messaging. “It’s going to be an evolution of our concept…so that people can see it and feel it.”
Both founder and CEO see the Tory Burch Foundation, created in 2009, as an enormous asset — to women’s entrepreneurship, and also to the brand. The foundation has given $85 million to women entrepreneurs, in addition to giving out $100 million in low interest loans with Bank of America.
“Even from the very first moment when I thought I wanted to start a business, giving back was something that I knew had to be part of it,” Burch said. “And I remember in 2004 people that I met with told me never say business and social responsibility, or, as I said, charity work in the same sentence. And it’s great to see that mindsets have shifted. Businesses today are not innovative without purpose, and that purpose is so ingrained in our company in an authentic way, and that’s the differentiator.…Women are the best investment. They pay back their loans at a 98 percent rate. So when we see women succeed, we see everyone succeed.”
The foundation was initially quite siloed from the Tory Burch brand, but there is starting to be more crossover, she said.
“In the beginning, I was super careful, because I never wanted it to be perceived as marketing in any way. Today, I don’t want it to be the best kept secret, so we’re trying to get our foundation and the work we do, because it’s real and has a lot of impact, out there in a more significant way. So that’s a big initiative, is, how do we link the two in a more substantial way? We have a community of close to 3 million women across the U.S., and we need to build on that.”
“When people join us and we try to attract great talent, which is obviously something [that] is a priority for us, they obviously love the brand, they love Tory, they love the journey, they relate to our aesthetic. But the foundation is a very big part of the excitement,” Roussel said of the opportunity.
Looking ahead at the broader, challenged retail landscape, they stressed again that movement is key.
“Change is inevitable and innovation and evolution essential,” Burch said of the recipe for resilience.
“And change before you see it in the numbers,” Roussel said. “Because it takes time and if you wait until it’s apparent that you have to change, then you go through a pretty painful cycle before you get the impact of the change.”