Early shoots of recovery at Saks
Saks Global Enterprises, which owns the beleaguered empire of Saks, Neiman Marcus, and Bergdorf Goodman, says that it will be receiving around $1.2 billion in merchandise from its vendors over the next few months.
After filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last month, the retailer’s CEO Geoffroy van Raemdonck told Bloomberg that more than 380 brands are now shipping to them, following a general pause for breath among scarred suppliers as it had been hurtling towards a financial brick wall in the last few months.
“The brands resumed faster than I thought,” van Raemdonck told Bloomberg. “The majority of brands are shipping.”
The likes of LVMH and Kering have confirmed that they have resumed or continued shipping to Saks Global Enterprises.
“There’s none of our top one hundred brands that have told us that they’re not doing business with us going forward,” added van Raemdonck, who took over as CEO last month and who was previously head of Neiman Marcus Group when it merged with Saks Fifth Avenue two years ago.
He claims that the value of inventory that Saks Global has received so far in February is down just a low-single-digit percentage year-on-year.
The resumption of the flow of goods from vendors to the store is welcome news, but it’s unlikely that the situation is as rosy as it seems. Multiple brands, albeit ones that aren’t on the same scale as the likes of Chanel or Kering, have told Watch Insider that they’re powerless in the face of unpaid invoices as a result of the Chapter 11 filing.
For a lot of companies the Saks account represents such a significant percentage of annual turnover that these suppliers largely have to accept the situation — often with the unpaid debt being written off — and pray that the situation improves for everyone’s sake.
