Tory Burch was founded by American designer Tory Burch in 2004, and it is a luxury fashion brand that is based in New York City. They specialize in ready-to-wear apparel, haute couture, fashion accessories, and of course, luxury goods. In 2015, the company’s founder, Tory Burch, was listed by Forbes as the 73rd most powerful woman in the world. In this article, we are going to find out the history of this iconic luxury fashion brands and how it achieved the status it has today.
Personal Life of Tory Burch
Tory Burch was born in Pennsylvania, and she was the daughter of Ira Earl Robinson and Reva Robinson. She grew up together with her three brothers in a farmhouse near Valley Forge National Historical Park. She attended the Agnes Irwin School, where she got to be friends with jewelry designer Kara Ross. Tory Burch got her first job at Benetton in the King of Prussia Mall. She then went to college at the University of Pennsylvania, where she majored in art history.
After she graduated in college in 1988, Tory Burch moved to New York City, where she worked for a Yugoslavian designer, Zoran. After that, she got a job at Harper’s Bazaar magazine when she worked at Vera Wang in their public relations and advertising.
The Birth of a Brand
In 2004, Tory Burch decided to establish her own fashion label, which she initially named TRB by Tory Burch, which was later known as Tory Burch. She launched it by opening a retail store in Manhattan. The business proved to be successful because, on its first day of opening, most of the inventory was sold. When Oprah Winfrey endorsed her clothing line on the Oprah Winfrey show, she called it the next big thing in fashion. After the exposure, Tory Burch’s website gained eight million hits in just one day.
Since then, the company started to grow, wherein it opened about 250 Tory Burch stores all over the world, including flagship stores in London, Los Angeles, New York, Seoul, Tokyo, and Rome. They also launched their e-commerce sites in eight different languages.
Tory Burch’s fashion line includes a wide array of ready-to-wear clothes, handbags, shoes, home decors, watches, beauty collection, and fragrance. The brand is also carried in over 3,000 department and specialty stores all over the world, including Nordstrom, Bergdorf Goodman, Bloomingdales, Lane Crawford, Saks Fifth Avenue, Harrods, Neiman Marcus, and Galeries Lafayette.
In 2009, Tory Burch decided to sell a minority stake in her company to Tresalia Capital, which is a Mexican private equity firm. In 2012, the company added a minority of investors in aggregation with the settlement of a legal dispute between Tory and her ex-husband.
In 2011, Tory Burch did her first runway fashion show, and since then, he continued to do it at the New York Fashion Week. Two years after that, Tory Burch introduced their first fragrance line along with a beauty capsule collection where they collaborated with Estee Lauder. In 2014, the company released a range of accessories for the Fitbit Flex activity tracking device. This made her the first major fashion brand to have a wearable technology line. In 2019, the brand announced that they had agreed to have a long-term partnership with beauty brand Shiseido to help market, develop, and distribute Tory Burch beauty brands in 2020.
Tory Sport
Tory Burch introduced their activewear line Tory Sport in September 2015, which was offered on their website. It also had a pop-up shop in Manhattan in the space where the brand launched its first boutique in 2004. In 2016, they also opened a stand-alone store of Tory Sport on Fifth Avenue in New York and boutiques in Dallas and East Hampton. In late 2017, Tory Burch had stores in several cities around the United States, and they also opened an in-store boutique at the Tory Burch store in Hong Kong. The Tory Sport collection includes activewear apparel for studio tennis, running, golf, workout, and swimming.
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