It is almost unheard of for fledgling brands to be up against the likes of Michael Kors and Marc Jacobs for an award and win, but one did. In June 2008, just four years after opening her first shop in the Nolita District of New York City, Tory Burch won Best Accessory Designer of the Year by the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA). Then again, it also almost unheard of to make $100,000 in sales the opening night of a store as Tory Burch did.

Tory Burch grew up in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, in a sprawling 250-year-old white, Georgian house surrounded by 30 acres of land. Growing up Burch was a tomboy climbing the trees in the back yard or running around with her older brothers Robert and James. Burch, now known for her feminine casual wear, said that when she was younger, her mother would have to force her to wear a dress. She attended the prestigious Agnes Irwin School where she excelled at sports, enjoyed riding horses and was the captain of the tennis team. At the University of Pennsylvania, she majored in Art History; however, it did not compare to her true love: fashion. Even on campus she dressed very well. Burch told Vanity Fair in 2007 that her friend Patrick at the University described her style as, “Half preppy and half jock—or prock” it eventually came to be known as “Torywear.” Beginning with her first job out of college, all of her jobs have been in the fashion industry.

Tory Burch’s parents gave their children a comfortable, almost extravagant lifestyle on Philadelphia’s Main Line, and their socio-economic status put them in elite social circles. Her parents, Buddy and Reva Robinson, loved to spend their summers in Europe and her mother would stop by Morocco on the way home to buy tunics—a garment that became Tory’s signature. Her mother frequently shopped in New York City for designer clothing and her closet is full of vintage labels such as Valentino and Zoran. In every interview, Burch says that her parents’ eclectic and worldly style influenced her own design style. “I always watch my mother, Reva, get dressed at night, and just look incredibly stylish. And my father had his own innate sense of style. He used to design every piece of his clothing and have incredible details, like lining his dinner jackets with Hermes scarves and piping them and all of his shirts with initials. He was one of my biggest, biggest inspirations,” Burch said in an interview with Women’s Wear Daily. The 1960s and 1970s fashion also served as Burch’s fashion muse, as well as Audrey Hepburn’s film Two for the Road.

Reva Robinson frequented Zoran so much that Burch’s first job after graduation was working at the Public Relations department there. She then moved on to become a copywriter for Ralph Lauren, which she left in 1995 to work in Public Relations with Vera Wang. Before working at Vera Wang, she was briefly married to William Macklowe, son of New York real-estate mogul Harry Macklowe. At Vera Wang, she kept on running into Chris Burch, a venture capitalist 14 years her senior. They married in 1996 and during their honeymoon she became pregnant with her twin sons, Henry and Nick. Chris Burch had three older daughters—Pookie, Louisa, and Izzie—from a previous marriage. She later had a third son, Sawyer. In a house full of six children, it became increasingly hard for Tory to work and be a full-time mom. She gave up her career for a period of time, but she says she began to grow “restless.” She started cutting out pages from books, magazines, etc., and created a scrapbook of sorts and later showed prominent fashion designers who were quite impressed with her ideas.

Burch has said in many interviews that after 9/11 an inspirational commercial about “following your dreams” often came on and she finally decided to take the plunge into fashion design—something she had never done before. Her husband, Chris, financed much of her project, contributing $2 million. Before opening in 2004, Burch worked relentlessly for eight months putting the collection together. The night before, her step-daughters and she were up the entire night putting on the final touches. Burch only went home to shower before the store’s opening. Her status at that point had made her a permanent fixture in New York City’s elite social circles and with the friends she made while working at the big fashion labels, her store opening was sprinkled with celebrities, fashion columnists, and the “who’s who” of the fashion world. Burch never expected that on her first day nearly her entire inventory would be sold out.

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