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Saks Global, the New York-based parent company of Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman, emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy on 26 June with a new name, a leaner store portfolio and, for the first time in several years, something resembling a clear direction. The company is now called Exemplar Luxury Group. The debt has been cut by roughly 75 per cent. And CEO Geoffroy van Raemdonck is making the case that American luxury retail is ready to start again.
For anyone who has shopped at Bergdorf Goodman, walked through a Neiman Marcus in the weeks before Christmas or spent a Saturday afternoon on Saks Fifth Avenue’s shoe floor, the bankruptcy period was an odd thing to witness. These are not abstract corporate entities. They are places with a specific atmosphere, a particular kind of Saturday afternoon energy and a sales associate who has been on the same floor for fifteen years and knows what you actually want before you do. All of that continued through the Chapter 11 process. The stores stayed open. The Chanel counter did not go anywhere. But the uncertainty around who was getting paid and when cast a shadow that the industry felt acutely.
What collapsed the original structure was the weight of debt accumulated through Saks Global’s $2.7 billion acquisition of the Neiman Marcus Group in July 2024, a deal led by Richard Baker that never had the runway it needed. Before the filing, the group ran 33 Saks Fifth Avenue stores, 36 Neiman Marcus locations, the Bergdorf Goodman women’s store at Fifth Avenue and 58th Street, the men’s store across the avenue at 745 Fifth Avenue, and roughly 70 Saks Off 5th outlets. Exemplar now operates 49 stores across the three prestige banners: 15 Saks Fifth Avenue locations, 33 Neiman Marcus stores and both Bergdorf Goodman buildings. Saks Off 5th has been reduced to 12 remaining sites, operating as a liquidation channel after closing 57 units.
The name change is the most visible signal of the reset. Saks Global described a structure. Exemplar is a bet on a different kind of conversation with the brands it stocks and the customers it serves. Van Raemdonck told the Associated Press on Friday that the name reflects the group’s commitment to an exemplary shopping experience. He also has 1,500-plus sales associates on staff who have each sold more than a million dollars of goods, a client relationship capability that took decades to develop and cannot be replicated by a returns portal or a personalisation algorithm. If Exemplar has a genuine advantage over the e-commerce platforms that have been eating into the department store model for years, it lives in those people.
The recovery story will be written in designer showrooms as much as anywhere else. Vendor relationships were badly strained in the lead-up to the filing, and rebuilding them is the unsexy work that determines whether the business actually functions. Van Raemdonck has confirmed that every supplying brand now has an agreed payment schedule Exemplar is meeting, and that the group will purchase more than $3 billion of goods at cost annually across its three banners. For a British or European house weighing up its American wholesale strategy, a reliably paying Exemplar is a different calculation to the one that existed six months ago.
The new board reflects how seriously the company is treating the recovery. Pentwater Capital Management and Bracebridge Capital, both of which backed Exemplar through the restructuring, will each hold two seats on the seven-person board alongside van Raemdonck and two independent directors. Philippe Schaus spent years running Moet Hennessy and, before that, DFS Group, which means he understands precisely how luxury brands evaluate their wholesale partners. Dave Kimbell brings consumer retail depth from his tenure as CEO of Ulta Beauty. Both appointments read as deliberate choices for a company whose most urgent problem is how the industry perceives it.
Van Raemdonck has said that differentiating the three banners more sharply is a priority. Bergdorf Goodman has a clear identity rooted in its Fifth Avenue address and its longstanding reputation for selective buying. Its women’s store, open since 1928 on the site of the former Cornelius Vanderbilt II mansion, carries a weight that no restructuring touches. The more pressing question is what a Saks Fifth Avenue experience offers a customer in Atlanta or Dallas that a Neiman Marcus in the same city does not. Saks Fifth Avenue contracted from 33 stores to 15 through the process, and Neiman Marcus, which kept most of its locations, is now the group’s largest banner by count. Van Raemdonck has not addressed that internal shift directly, but it is visible in the numbers.
American luxury retail is not an easy business. It has not been for a long time. Exemplar enters its first week with a balance sheet it can actually work from, $500 million in additional financing and a debt load that is finally proportionate to what the business can carry. Whether the industry and the customer extend the goodwill needed to make it work is the question Friday’s announcement opened rather than closed.
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