Aspire with Emma Grede
On Negativity, Ambition, and Building a Serious Business (Tory Burch)
28 Apr 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: How did Tory Burch start her fashion brand?
I am so excited to share my debut book with you all, Start With Yourself, which is available now. You might have seen the headlines. You might have seen the social. But this book is exactly what I intended, a conversation that will make you think. And it's a blueprint for anyone who wants success without the toxic positivity. Start With Yourself is about self-reliance.
leadership because wherever I go, women ask me how I got to where I am. But what you really want to know is how you can get there. So I'm doing what I do best, sharing and never gatekeeping what's worked for me in the hope that you can borrow from a philosophy that has served me so well. The truth is I'm not an expert. I've just lived it. I've made the mistakes.
I've had the failures and I've learned what actually works. It takes a lot. It takes the most.
Chapter 2: What challenges did Tory face during her public divorce and lawsuit?
And this book is for anyone who's tired of feeling like a passenger in their own life. It's about taking responsibility for your thinking, managing your emotions and getting clear on your ideas and then knowing your next step. It's about picking yourself up after failure, being accountable, but also forgiving yourself, pushing for wins and never, ever apologising for your ambition.
It's also about challenging the rules that you've been told. There is no perfect time. Balance isn't the goal. Alignment is. And there's nothing wrong with you wanting more. I'm precisely sure that the reason I've been so successful is so I can share it with you. Start with yourself. My debut book is available now. Visit emagreed.com to purchase the book.
Also available on Amazon, your favorite audio platforms, and all good bookshops. So today I'm speaking to Tory Burch, one of the founders that I admire the most. Tory Burch has built an incredible American luxury brand worth billions of dollars.
Chapter 3: Why is ambition a complicated word for women according to Tory?
What we're going to talk about today is how she built a billion-dollar brand from her apartment in New York, why ambition is still a dirty word for women, and why she decided to step down as CEO of her own company when so few women get to occupy that space. You will not want to miss this episode. And whatever you do, don't forget to like and subscribe.
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It's lightweight, it disappears under clothes, and there's just no adjusting halfway through the day. That's the standard. You put it on and forget about it because it's doing exactly what it should. We built skims around the idea that the pieces closest to your body deserve the most thought.
Chapter 4: How did Tory maintain brand identity while scaling her business?
Everyday cotton is the same philosophy in its simplest form. Shop Everyday Cotton and all of my favourite bras and underwear at skims.com. And after you place your order, be sure to let them know that we sent you. Select podcast in the survey and make sure you select our show in the drop down menu that follows. Tori Birch, welcome to Aspire. Oh, I'm so happy to be here. Thank you.
When I think about you and what you've done, you've built one of America's most iconic fashion brands, which is so incredible. We're talking billions of dollars in sales, 400 stores around the world, which is so incredible. A true global brand. And I've been reading and researching so much about you.
And I really want to take people back to the beginning and to understand exactly where you were when you decided to go and do that friends and family round, take a bet on yourself. It takes such an enormous amount of ambition. Where were you and why did you have such certainty that you could actually do this?
Yeah, well, let's start with, I had a career that I loved and I was working for LVMH, working for Loewe, and I got pregnant with my third son.
Chapter 5: What creative changes occurred when Tory stepped back as CEO?
So I had three boys under the age of four. And so I was traveling to Paris and Spain and realized that I wouldn't be able to be a great mom. So I had to make one of those decisions that a lot of women have to, and it was really choosing being a mom over a career. And that was a really hard decision choice.
I mean, it wasn't hard to choose being a great mom, but it was hard to give up a career that I loved. And so it was during the time that I was a stay-at-home mom that I worked on this concept because I knew I wanted to go back to work. I just didn't know what that work would be. So in tandem, I was working on a school, starting a school, and I was also working on starting a company.
And it was about reviving a company from the 60s and 70s that my mom used to wear. It was called Jack's.
Really? Yeah. That's what you were going to do?
I was going to do it.
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Chapter 6: How does Tory cope with negativity and criticism?
I worked on it for months and decided finally that the school would go off to the side. I would try to start this company. And there was this great entrepreneur named Sally Hansen. And she had hired Rudy Gernreich, who was the designer at the time. They started this company called Jax. And the best way to describe it is like, it was great pieces that were impossible to find. Right.
Audrey Hepburn wore it, Jackie O, all these incredibly stylish people. What happened to Jack? And so it went out of business, but I had a lot of the clothes because my mother wore it. And so I did all of this research. I spent months on it and I got in touch with this incredible woman named Corby who used to run their New York showroom. She ended up getting me in touch with Sally Hansen.
And after months of work and a giant presentation, I got her on the phone and Are we talking Sally Hansen?
Chapter 7: What role does community impact play in Tory's business philosophy?
Hard as nails. Yeah. That's Sally Hansen? That's Sally Hansen. She's an incredible entrepreneur. And so I called her. I got every bit of courage up to give her a call. And 30 seconds later, I realized it was a hard no.
Really?
How'd you take that? I was just blown away because no didn't occur to me. And so I thought it was going to be a given that it would be called Jax.
And it was, so I had to start over. Did you immediately decide, okay, I'm going to go and do my own thing. Like how long did it take you?
Chapter 8: What advice does Tory have for aspiring female entrepreneurs?
Because when you've got a vision for something and then you get that type of knockback, sometimes that can be hard to take.
What did you do? I went and I started, I started to think about branding and then I, then I hired a branding company. And I started to think about an interior designer called David Hicks. That was a big inspiration. My parents had books on him. My mother loved his work. And I was like, okay, if I'm going to do a company, I didn't want it to be my name.
I was trying to get so many different names, none of which I could get. I launched with a terrible name and also a logo. And it was because I couldn't get jacks. And that was why, that was the start of me doing my own thing. Are you absolutely kidding me? So it was totally unintentional.
It was not my plan, but I had to pivot. That is so crazy. So how did it turn into Tory Burch, your name, and this kind of initial friends and family round that you went out on?
So that takes a little bit of a while. I started it with my ex-husband who had a history of a company called Eagle's Eye. So he... He did the production in Hong Kong. And so he had that knowledge. So we started this company. I had this logo. People had so many different opinions. I had this idea. It was contrary to everything that people had told me to do. So it was a direct-to-consumer concept.
It was an e-commerce site. Wow, direct-to-consumer. Which year was this now? It was 2004.
Okay.
So it was planning in 2003, but no one was selling online. So people told me no one would ever buy online. So I launched with an out-of-the-way store down on Elizabeth Street and an e-commerce site. And the very first day we realized we were onto something. What was it that gave you that idea? You know, it was just, first of all, the work leading up to that was excruciating.
It was like flying back and forth to Asia, managing three boys, working out of my apartment. So there are all these things that went into it. The opening day, it was, I had grown up in fashion and had this great career. So it was press, it was friends, family. And we opened 10 in the morning till six at night. And it was almost as if it was building throughout the day.
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