BY JUHI DESAI

Tory Burch has spent the past decade building a women's apparel and accessories empire with $1 billion in annual sales and more than 2,000 employees. Now, she's teaming up with Bank of America to help thousands of other women build their own businesses, some just getting off the ground.

Through a nonprofit foundation she started in 2009, Ms. Burch will provide at least $10 million of the bank's capital to women entrepreneurs in loans administered by Community Development Financial Institutions, or CDFIs, in 18 markets, starting with such cities as New York, Las Vegas and San Francisco.

The program, which she calls Elizabeth Street Capital -- named for the location of her first Tory Burch boutique— will also host mentoring and peer-to-peer networking events at Tory Burch stores, she said during a Friday interview in her Manhattan office.

Ms. Burch, 47, represents a growing piece of the startup-mentoring scene aimed at increasing the ranks of women entrepreneurs, who are vastly underrepresented among U.S. founders. Others include Joanne Wilson, the wife of New York venture capitalist Fred Wilson, and an angel investor primarily in nascent women-owned businesses; and Sallie Krawcheck, the past head of global wealth management at Bank of America, who acquired the global women's network 85 Broads in 2013.

Ms. Burch, who once worked for Vera Wang, Ralph Lauren and the fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar, said she is no stranger to the struggles of women entrepreneurs. In an interview in her office Friday, she said she faced skeptics and difficulty finding capital when she began fundraising for her company, Tory Burch LLC, recently valued at nearly $4 billion. She has since expanded her business internationally and partnered with a few investors. A year ago, Connecticut-based General Atlantic and Chicago-based BDT Capital Partners, acquired 20% of her company through stakes held by her former husband, J. Christopher Burch.

Edited excerpts:

WSJ: What are some of the specific issues you're trying to mitigate for women entrepreneurs?

Teaching women to have confidence and to believe in their businesses, balancing family and work, and helping to overcome and eradicate the stereotypes of women in business. I learned on the job and I had never run a business. Being a woman in business, you have to have a louder voice, and that's not me naturally as a person. We apologize a lot and as a group and we're not always the best advocates for ourselves. Even making the correct salary that we should-- equality of pay-- I really believe that should be a given, and that it should be about the quality of work. I was not great at asking for my salary when I had different jobs. I really want to teach women and girls that it is okay to value the work that you're contributing and that you should be paid equally.

I know women have a harder time getting loans. When I started this company a lot of people had raised eyebrows and didn't take it that seriously and I felt it. I never knew that growing up. I grew up with three brothers with the feeling that I could do anything; that's how my parents raised me. Then when you get into the workforce it's a different kind of feeling that you get from people.

WSJ: How did the Tory Burch Foundation come to focus on loans to women entrepreneurs?

I was introduced to [national nonprofit microlender] Accion by Trevor and Maggie Neilson, [founders of Global Philanthropy Group, a firm that guides the philanthropic activities of high net-worth individuals]. They really helped me get the Tory Burch Foundation off the ground. Accion has a great reputation and we needed them for the microlending. They also helped us vet the entrepreneurs in the beginning.

Our average loan has been about $8,000, and up to $50,000. That is actually a good place for the businesses we've looked at so far. But I'm sure we can go well beyond that as well.

[The new connection with] Bank of America happened because my former University of Pennsylvania roommate Hayley Boesky works there [as vice chairman of global markets]. She came up with this idea to initiate this project. Hayley has been a huge advocate of the foundation.

An institution like Bank of America, I'm not sure that entrepreneurs would initially go to them. If they go to a large bank, they're generally denied a loan. And in this new initiative, Bank of America is providing the funds but the loans will be given out through CDFIs. A lot of entrepreneurs don't know about CDFIs, they don't know what they are and have never heard of them. We can really help educate women about how to think about where they can go to access capital and smaller loans. Bank of America looks at this first initial $10 million as just a starting point and have committed even up to $100 million if it's a successful program.

We'll be able to scale with sustainability. For the next two years, we want women to really get those loans, women from all kinds of places. To qualify, they have to have a viable business, it doesn't matter what kind of business.

WSJ: Are you planning an IPO for Tory Burch LLC?

We're not even considering it at the moment. It hasn't been a discussion. You never know what happens, but for now, we're happy the way we are. I just personally don't want it. I love building a company with my team. We have an extraordinary team, and it's just not something that's on the table.

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