Long before shopping had an algorithm, it had Saks Fifth Avenue. For several generations of discerning luxury buyers, Saks stood as the definitive arbiter of elegance, glamour, and impeccably good taste. As Donatella Versace once famously declared inside its Midtown Manhattan flagship, "Saks is New York." Yet, its influence extended far beyond the boundaries of Manhattan. Its sumptuous, beautifully curated stores across the country became coveted destinations in their own right, defining the pinnacle of American luxury retail for decades.
From Armani to Zegna, Saks carried rack upon rack of enticing indulgences. Shoppers could peruse Oscar de la Renta evening gowns, snakeskin Gucci loafers, Montblanc fountain pens, Dior eaux de toilettes, precisely tailored Ralph Lauren suits, and matching Burberry trench coats for both adults and children. The aisles featured iconic Chanel 2.55 handbags and Louis Vuitton briefcases, alongside a proprietary house label that offered beautifully crafted pearl necklaces, buttery calfskin gloves, and extra-soft cashmere pullovers and cardigans.
"Saks was the reliable destination where you knew you could find whatever you wanted," says Julia Stedman, a New York-based brand-strategy consultant who works at the intersection of fashion and technology and shopped at the emporium for decades. "Every luxury brand was there."
Footwear was a particular strongpoint, anchored by covetable labels such as Manolo Blahnik, Roger Vivier, Jimmy Choo, and Christian Louboutin. At the imposing Manhattan flagship—a bustling Midtown magnet for both locals and tourists since it first opened its doors in 1924—the massive eighth-floor designer shoe department earned a unique distinction that no other store in the country could claim. In 2007, the United States Postal Service granted the floor its very own zip code: 10022-SHOE.
"It was a great shoe department to begin with," Stedman recalls, "and then they expanded it. Literally, you could find anything and everything you could ever imagine and ever want. And it was always packed and bustling." In the 2008 film The Women, Annette Bening’s character offered a simpler, widely accepted verdict: "Nobody. Hates. Saks." At the time, it would have been hard to disagree.
Over the past few years, however, the company’s prestige took a severe beating. A cascading series of financial and managerial problems, many directly tied to the 2024 acquisition of Neiman Marcus, culminated in Saks Global filing for bankruptcy protection in January with a staggering $3.4 billion in debt. Following a complex restructuring process, the firm announced in June that it had officially emerged from Chapter 11. Operating with a significantly reduced footprint of stores, the restructured enterprise is now known as Exemplar Luxury Group. Whether Saks can fully recover its former stature—and the enduring affection of luxury shoppers—remains an open question.
In the wake of the corporate merger, the daily shopping experience had already visibly deteriorated. Customers increasingly found their once-beloved retail sanctuaries stocked with sporadic, often sparse assortments across their favorite categories.
"People just felt that it wasn’t the same Saks that they used to shop at," says Anita Berger, a former senior salesperson at the Saks Fifth Avenue location in St. Louis, Missouri, which had maintained a fiercely loyal client base for more than half a century.
To be fair, traditional department stores have been under immense pressure for years. Consumers increasingly shop online through brand websites, Amazon, and secondary resale platforms like TheRealReal. Instead of spending leisurely afternoons browsing physical racks of clothing and receiving personalized advice from trusted, long-tenured salespeople, modern shoppers draw inspiration directly from social media feeds. Furthermore, tailored suits and men’s ties no longer anchor everyday wardrobes the way they once did, a cultural shift accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Many retail analysts now question whether the classic grand-department-store model—featuring floor after cavernous floor packed with massive inventories—has simply become obsolete.
"What you have is literally this transition and shift in the paradigm," says Marshal Cohen, chief retail adviser at Circana, a firm that tracks consumer-buying patterns. "The model needs to adjust."
As Bain & Company noted in a 2024 report detailing the state of American department stores, "Many U.S. shoppers are now indifferent or averse to the format."
Even before Saks Fifth Avenue’s purchase of Neiman Marcus in December 2024, warning signs were flashing. Sensitive industry players sensed underlying trouble as familiar buyers and trusted floor salespeople began turning over at an unsettling rate.
"You could kind of smell that something was going on, just because everything was getting a little difficult," says Daniel Wingate, founder and creative director of Wingate, a collection of sophisticated designer women’s apparel previously sold via trunk shows at various Saks Fifth Avenue locations. "The people in the stores were in and out and changing, unhappy. Then," he adds, "the rumor started that they were trying to buy Neimans."
That rumor ultimately proved true, but the acquisition helped saddle Saks Global with a crushing debt burden that soon made it difficult to pay suppliers for incoming products. Eventually, many fashion and beauty brands felt they had no choice but to halt shipments entirely.
"Every one of my clients was saying, ‘God, the stores look so bad—there’s no inventory,’" explains Gary Wassner, CEO of Hilldun, a financing firm that guarantees payments for approximately 180 fashion and beauty brands carried across Saks Global stores, including Rick Owens, Golden Goose, Ulla Johnson, Isabel Marant, and Victoria Beckham.
"The consumer was well aware walking into any Saks Fifth Avenue that the inventory was depleted," he adds. "It was quite noticeable, particularly as the days wore on."
"My floor looked so bad," echoes Berger. "Customers would come in and say, ‘Are you closing? This looks like Saks Off 5th.’ There was nothing new and exciting because they couldn’t get anything—they owed money to everybody."
"We never had a full size run of dresses," recalls Babatunde Fakuade, who worked for nearly a year as a salesperson at Neiman Marcus Lenox Square in Atlanta. "We would get a size 2, a 12, an 8. It’s like, ‘Where are the other sizes?’ We didn’t get a delivery of full size runs of dresses for months at a time."
The St. Louis store where Berger spent nearly a decade ultimately closed in May, though she had already departed the previous September.
"How they were treating us, how they were not paying, how the store looked—I just started to feel like, ‘I need to get out,’" she says.
"It made more financial sense, literally, to leave the organization without a job secured," says Fakuade, who left Neiman Marcus months ago to pivot toward a career as a retail business consultant.
The cash-flow complications predated the Neiman Marcus acquisition. Saks Global had previously combined Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman, Horchow, and the discount banners Saks Off 5th and Last Call. However, Saks entered the broader corporate consolidation already carrying significant debt, much of it linked to its 2013 purchase by Hudson’s Bay Company, a historic Canadian retailer with roots dating back to 1670.
Several early corporate moves raised eyebrows among financial analysts. The Fifth Avenue flagship building was mortgaged in 2014 for approximately $1.2 billion, creating heavy monthly debt service obligations. In 2016, the company acquired off-price retailer Gilt Groupe for $250 million, ostensibly to bolster Saks Off 5th, only to sell it a couple of years later for an undisclosed sum widely rumored to be far lower. Additional investments piled further recurring payments onto the cash-strapped company.
"There were a lot of prior Hudson’s Bay issues—leases and bonds—that Saks, through succession, became obligated on," explains Lorenzo Marinuzzi, a partner at the law firm Morrison Foerster, which represents Saks Global’s unsecured creditors, including luxury giants Chanel and LVMH.
Hudson’s Bay’s persistent financial baggage did little to reassure vendors who were waiting anxiously to be paid. As Marinuzzi notes, "When you’re telling your vendors that you don’t have money to pay them for goods they’ve sold or shipped or consigned or delivered to your stores, yet you’re paying off this Hudson’s Bay debt, it rubs people the wrong way."
Hudson’s Bay Company ultimately filed for bankruptcy protection and shuttered all of its remaining retail operations.
As Saks Global began to unravel, many industry observers pointed their fingers directly at Richard Baker, who served as Hudson’s Bay Company’s governor, executive chairman, and CEO, and later assumed the role of executive chairman of Saks Global. Baker’s primary professional background is in real estate, and critics argued that his approach to managing department store operations frequently emphasized property acquisition and high-level dealmaking over the delicate craftsmanship of a luxury garment or designer evening dress. Baker previously acquired Lord & Taylor in 2006 with extensive financing, later selling its flagship building to WeWork in 2017 and its retail operations to Le Tote in 2019; those traditional brick-and-mortar stores subsequently closed in 2020.
This strategic emphasis was clearly reflected in Saks Global’s own corporate communications. A July 2024 press release announcing the planned Neiman Marcus purchase described the newly formed entity as "a combination of world-class luxury retail and real-estate assets." When the transaction was finalized, Baker stated that the plan was "to redefine the luxury shopping experience" through initiatives that included leveraging "a portfolio of prime real estate."
"There’s a lot of head-scratching about the way Richard Baker handled himself and ran the company, his background—maybe it wasn’t the right background for this kind of retailer," Marinuzzi says. "When people thought about the decisions that were being made and how the company was being operated, they didn’t really trust management, and they didn’t trust Richard Baker."
When the multi-billion-dollar transaction was first announced, Baker told The New York Times that "when selling luxury products, you need beautiful stores and salespeople customers trust." By the time Saks Global formally filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, many of those same stores instead featured thinly stocked sales floors and demoralized, disgruntled employees.
Baker departed Saks Global in January. Today, his public focus appears to have returned primarily to real estate, highlighted by regular posts on his Instagram account, where his biography describes him as "Behind $Billions in Real Estate." When approached for an interview for this story, Baker provided a concise response: "No comment on Saks at this time." Exemplar Luxury Group also declined repeated requests to make current executives available for comment.
When Saks Global filed for bankruptcy, the sums owed to the world’s most prominent luxury conglomerates were staggering. According to court documents filed in January, the retailer owed more than $136 million to Chanel; roughly $60 million to Kering, the parent company of Gucci, Saint Laurent, and Bottega Veneta; about $30 million to Richemont, owner of Cartier, Montblanc, and Chloé; and nearly $16 million to the Estée Lauder Companies, whose portfolio includes La Mer, Jo Malone London, Le Labo, and Tom Ford.
While those losses are undeniably vast, global luxury houses possess substantial financial cushions, including their own standalone boutiques, counters in rival department stores, and immense international reach. For smaller, independent brands, however, late or missing payments can prove catastrophic.
"As a small business, you have limited bandwidth," says a senior executive at a small, critically acclaimed beauty brand formerly carried at Neiman Marcus. "Finances are not just endless."
Her brand has still not received the "six figures" it is owed for orders successfully shipped to the retailer, despite filing legal paperwork seeking to recover at least a portion of the balance. Without that critical income, the brand’s lean management team was forced to terminate contracts with several essential freelancers, and one manager subsequently left for another job. The company is now attempting to slowly rebuild its retail network and customer base through alternative vendors.
She is one of several industry sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity, pointing out that in the tightly knit fashion world, reputation and relationships are paramount. Many former Saks Global staffers approached for this story noted that they had signed strict nondisclosure agreements or were currently involved in active litigation regarding unpaid compensation, forcing them to decline comment.
Independent beauty and apparel labels were far from alone in making painful sacrifices to maintain operations without expected revenues.
"You have to keep going," explains an executive at another beauty label owed more than a quarter of a million dollars by Saks Global. "So you’re looking at your people, you’re looking at your programs. You might be cutting advertising or awareness programs. You may be cutting marketing plans, launches, photo shoots, company parties. It’s going to be rolled all the way across, because for small businesses to lose money like that is very serious. It seriously affects your bottom line."
For one celebrity-adored women’s fashion brand carried by Saks, the fallout included canceling a major runway show—and forfeiting the substantial deposit paid on the event space—according to a marketing executive familiar with the situation.
A senior executive at another lauded fashion label reports that missing payments directly impaired the brand’s ability to pay for essential raw materials like fabric and buttons, ongoing production costs, staff salaries, and outside contractors such as public relations agencies and business consultants. The company ultimately resorted to laying off 20 percent of its workforce to survive what the executive describes as "this cash vacuum."
The experience, he adds, "will probably stall our business five years in terms of its growth trajectory."
His brand is currently owed several hundred thousand dollars and has received only one full payment for collections delivered across 2024 and 2025. On certain invoices, he notes, the company was paid mere pennies on the dollar, and he estimates that the firm will ultimately recover only about 20 percent of its total receivables.
The operational breakdown began with delayed remittances, which rapidly snowballed into a complete breakdown in corporate communication. "We continuously started reaching out for payment and updates, and they went ghost mode on us," he says. "They didn’t respond to us for months."
Compounding the frustration, appeals for payment were frequently routed to administrative representatives in Bengaluru, India, where Saks Global had outsourced core corporate functions including finance, human resources, merchandising, analytics, and marketing.
"It felt like people who really were not connected to who we were," he says. "I’m like, ‘Who are we talking to?’" In one instance, he recalls, his brand’s name was misspelled entirely in official correspondence.
"You’re trying to explain to India how you work," says designer Daniel Wingate. "In the end, it felt like that was a stunt to just delay your payments." Wingate ultimately employed a collection agency to recoup a portion of the money he was owed, though he acknowledges he still maintains "six figures of open invoices that haven’t been paid."
Predictably, independent brands faced far greater hurdles recovering funds than marquee luxury houses. According to a source familiar with Saks Global’s vendor payment tracking, many of the world-renowned designer brands carried by Saks, Neiman Marcus, and Bergdorf Goodman successfully recovered at least half of their outstanding debts. Some prominent designer labels managed to recoup their entire balances or close to it, though these specific settlement terms remain strictly guarded to prevent competitors from demanding comparable deals. Brands operating on strict concession or consignment models recovered totals closer to their owed amounts.
Representatives for Chanel, Kering, LVMH, and the Estée Lauder Companies declined to comment on the exact recovery status of their respective Saks debts.
Meanwhile, the designers represented by Hilldun were collectively owed more than $66 million by Saks Global, though slightly less than half of that total involved shipments that Hilldun had not formally guaranteed. Wassner confirms that his financing firm has paid its clients virtually all of the approved guaranteed debt, with the exception of a handful of vendor accounts still undergoing final reconciliation.
Other brands had already grown weary of payment instability stemming from Neiman Marcus’s previous 2020 bankruptcy before encountering Saks Global’s subsequent meltdown.
"We gave up," says an executive running a tastemaker-approved unisex grooming brand sold at both Neimans and Saks across multiple corporate iterations. "They promised to pay you if you would ship to them again, but I wasn’t taking that risk." His company is currently owed more than $100,000 by the retailer.
Following its bankruptcy filing, Saks Global initiated a sweeping corporate restructuring. The company shuttered 21 physical stores—comprising 18 Saks Fifth Avenue locations and three Neiman Marcus outposts—including long-standing flagships in Chicago (where Saks had operated continuously since 1929), Costa Mesa, Las Vegas, St. Louis, San Antonio, and McLean, Virginia. Furthermore, the company closed more than 60 discount-format stores under the Saks Off 5th and Last Call banners, though the lone international Saks outpost in Kazakhstan remains operational.
As retail floors were cleared out and remaining inventory heavily discounted, shoppers once again encountered Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus stores stripped of the upscale ambiance that had defined them for a century. Social media platforms like TikTok filled rapidly with viral videos showcasing bleak, winding down sales events that evoked images of liquidation rather than luxury.
"Bad news travels faster than good news," observes Circana adviser Cohen. "People love to share their war stories of shopping." And in the era of smartphones, that negative sentiment spreads faster than ever before.
As Saks Global restructured to successfully emerge from Chapter 11 protection, an initial injection of $1.75 billion in new capital allowed suppliers to be paid and fresh merchandise to begin flowing back into stores. In March, Exemplar Luxury Group announced that nearly 600 brands had formally resumed shipping products. During a recent walkthrough of the historic Saks Fifth Avenue flagship situated opposite Rockefeller Center, the store appeared amply stocked across its newly arranged floors.
According to Exemplar, sales associates across Bergdorf Goodman, Neiman Marcus, and Saks Fifth Avenue are currently generating higher overall sales figures compared to the same period in 2025, though corporate leadership declined to disclose exact percentage increases.
Nevertheless, rebuilding broken trust with both cautious consumers and skeptical fashion houses is by no means guaranteed.
"It’s hard to come out of that with both your brand partners and with your consumers," notes Aaron Cheris, a partner at Bain & Company and head of its global retail practice.
For consumers specifically, prolonged disappointment regarding customer service and product selection "creates a bit of a doom loop that you really have to get out of," he explains. The core challenge facing leadership, Cheris adds, is straightforward: "Can you convince both suppliers and customers that there’s a new day one?"
For independent designers who remain unconvinced by corporate promises, Exemplar’s ongoing vulnerability may ultimately become its competitors’ gain.
"Now more than ever, every brand I know wants to be in Bloomingdale’s," notes one prominent industry insider. "It’s almost like Bloomingdale’s and Nordstrom will become what Barneys was in the ’80s."
Meanwhile, many dedicated shoppers are adopting a cautious stance before returning to the fold.
"It’s going to take a while to rebuild my trust," says Stedman, the longtime Saks customer. "Going there during that funky period, there was no stock, everything was on sale—it was madness. During that time, what made Saks special was not there anymore."
"I’m going to take a wait-and-see approach," she concludes, "and see what happens with them."
