LOS ANGELES — Designer and retailer Tory Burch has boosted her presence here with the opening of a freestanding store, in Orange County’s South Coast Plaza shopping center.
“A lot of our customers in our New York store have mentioned South Coast Plaza as a place [to open],” said Burch. “Southern California is a place we definitely want to be — we have a very large clientele here.”
The 2,043-square-foot store, which opened last week, joins the shopping center’s stable of high-volume luxury retailers, including Barneys New York Co-op, Chloé and Tiffany.
“We’re in very good company,” said Burch, who declined to give sales estimates for the store.
The designer, who is going through a high-profile divorce with husband Christopher Burch (who helped launch the business financially in February 2004) said her soon-to-be ex will remain co-chairman of the company in the near future.
The firm officially changed the name of the stores from TRB by Tory Burch to the abbreviated Tory Burch this year.
The South Coast Plaza store is Tory Burch’s fifth freestanding unit, joining others on Elizabeth Street in New York, Robertson Boulevard in Los Angeles, in Highland Park Village in Dallas and at Phipps Plaza in Atlanta. A sixth store is scheduled to open in Greenwich, Conn., next month.
“We’d like to open three next year and have that be the [annual] goal in future years,” said Burch.
Wholesaling will remain a major priority.
The brand launched a shop-in-shop at Bloomingdale’s 59th Street store in New York last week. Burch estimated the in-store shop offers around 70 percent of the brand’s equestrian-inspired fall one line, which was delivered last month.
Tory Burch also is carried by Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, Bergdorf Goodman, Nordstrom and in more than 150 specialty stores nationwide.
The South Coast Plaza store shares the aesthetics of the brand’s existing units — green rugs, warm woods, Lucite and Burch’s signature color, orange.
“I think [a uniform look] is important to our branding in the future,” Burch said. “When I designed the store, I wanted to go the opposite of what everyone else was doing, which was the clean, minimal look, with everything white.”