Tory Burch doesn’t sleep well. She never has. The night before we meet in her sprawling New York City offices, she has stayed up until 3 a.m. watching The Handmaid’s Tale. The dystopian drama did little to assuage any big picture concerns. “I’m affected by things that are happening in the world right now,” she says. “It’s hard when we all want to have a better world for our children to live in and we want to create change.” She takes a beat, her face hardly betraying the fact that she’s slept for only five hours. “One thing I keep being told is that you’re only able to do what you can do.” She shrugs. “But I don’t really look at the world that way.”
Spend 10 minutes with Burch—who, at 53, is on the Forbes list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women—and it becomes obvious that her worldview is contrarian. As executive chairman and chief creative officer of Tory Burch LLC, she oversees a staff of 5,000 and reigns supreme in categories ranging from accessories to ready-to-wear to her latest endeavor, a lucrative deal with Japanese beauty behemoth Shiseido to develop, market, and distribute Tory Burch–branded beauty products all over the globe. It’s a big move, and one that will provide firm footing and a massive platform in the $532 billion beauty industry. “To me, we’ve always been an international lifestyle brand,” she says of the strategic partnership that will allow her to infiltrate Asia not as an outsider but as a key player. “Now we’re becoming global.”
And earlier this year Bank of America doubled its commitment to $100 million in affordable loans to women-led businesses vetted by the Tory Burch Foundation. “Tory is practical, direct, and clear with her vision,” says Bank of America vice chairman Anne M. Finucane. “As her success has grown, she has used her influence to help other women understand that being ambitious is an asset.”
In fact, redefining the A-word for women is something of a personal mission for Burch. “Fourteen years ago a journalist at the New York Times asked me if I was ambitious,” Burch recalls. “And it was meant to be snarky. I thought, That’s such a rude question.” I ask whether it was a male journalist who posed the question. “Yes, it was. Back then ambition, when it was associated with a woman, was not a positive. And I’ve been determined to change that harmful stereotype, the one that I bought into myself.”
If it seems that Burch is always one step ahead, that’s because, in so many ways, she is. She launched an e-commerce site back in 2004, shortly after opening her first Tory by TRB retail boutique. “People told me no one would ever buy online,” she says with a small smile. She published a digital magazine in 2009, well before brand blogs were all but required, and began cooking up her athletics-inspired Tory Sport line back when everyone was still wearing going-out tops. “We were working on Sport before the whole athleisure—my least favorite word—the whole athleisure boom,” she says. “It’s been another learning curve, because it’s basically another start-up.” And in 2009 she introduced the Tory Burch Foundation, with a focus on providing resources and capital to female entrepreneurs. “My plan was always to start a global lifestyle brand so that I could start a foundation,” she says. “People thought it was crazy. I was told never to say ‘business’ and ‘social responsibility’ in the same sentence.” These days, of course, there are entire agencies dedicated to helping fashion clients do just that.
Burch has been able to best the competition by eyeing a void (or voids) and owning it completely. “I’ve always been obsessed with the concept of reinvention and evolution, and being at the forefront of technology,” she says. “Evolution has helped us keep up with the macro environment, and also take our customer with us. We are not a designer price point, but we look through a luxury lens. We try to give our customer the best possible quality for the best possible price.”
And where Burch goes, the masses follow. A year after she launched the brand, Oprah Winfrey dubbed the newcomer with no design experience “the next big thing in fashion.” (A fashion executive turned stay-at-home mom, Burch had spent nearly four years “coming up with idea after idea of what I could do to start a business.”) Seemingly overnight her refined-prep aesthetic—an homage to her mom and a feminist take on the randy, rugby-inspired fast fashion of the era—became the new normal. “Tory appeared as if she came out of nowhere with her label that put women at the center of everything,” says Condé Nast global content adviser and Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour. “I think what Tory understands is that as you get bigger and bigger, the scale of the conversation shouldn’t change. You need to keep the sense of personal connection. And she has.”
As Burch grew the business, she also weathered her fair share of personal and professional setbacks, including a public divorce from investor Chris Burch in 2006. (The two have continued to coparent their three sons and his three daughters from a previous relationship, two of whom currently work at Tory Burch.) Then, in 2008, economic decline all but toppled traditional brick-and-mortar business models. “Our business had been on such a fast trajectory, and overnight it changed,” she says. Burch stayed nimble, leaning into e-commerce and accessory sales in lieu of outlet stores and quick-return licensing deals. She also leaned into her own temperament. “When things get frenetic, I get more focused,” she says. “And I get that from my dad. I take a step back, and I would say I’m very calm. People often check to see if I have a pulse.” She’s joking, but it’s something to consider. For Burch, one of the few women in the highest echelon of business, being inscrutable isn’t an edge—it’s a necessity. “I don’t want to act on emotion,” she says. “The word restraint is something that I always think about. And patience. We’re a patient brand. I’ve never necessarily wanted to be the biggest company. I wanted to be, obviously, the most profitable—but also the most inspiring place to work.”
Burch credits a recent uptick in company morale to naming her husband, former LVMH executive Pierre-Yves Roussel, CEO. “I had to marry him to get him here,” she says with a laugh. Her sense of humor, it should be noted, is both dry and a little irreverent. She knows the appointment of her husband raises eyebrows; she just doesn’t care. The duo keep offices on separate floors of the company’s headquarters and rarely talk shop at home. Burch views Roussel as a “thought partner” and a shrewd hire. “Because I was running a business as a creative, giving up operations was essential. The things that I’ve had to work so hard at and manage, he’s like a computer,” she says. “It’s the right thing for the business, and it’s the right thing for the next phase.”
Burch looks around her office, a large-scale manifestation of her vision of a global lifestyle brand. The company she had in mind 15 years ago. The best idea out of the many she considered while staying home with her three young sons. The one everyone called crazy. The one she runs with her brother Robert Isen, who has been the company's president of corporate development and chief legal officer for the past 11 years, and her husband, a highly accomplished number two. The company that bears only one name on the wall and could never exist without Tory Burch herself at its sturdy core. Her eyes and hands are unequivocally steady when she says this: “There is no such thing as being too ambitious.”
Come back each day this week to read profiles of the 2019 Glamour Women of the Year honorees and get your tickets to the two-day event here.
Justine Harman is a writer, editor, podcaster, and Glamour contributor in New York City.