Exemplar Luxury Group Is Ready to Win Back Brands and VICs

About 20 minutes before Exemplar Luxury Group (formerly Saks Global) hosted its first-ever client dinner, CEO Geoffroy van Raemdonck is personally inspecting the place settings and name cards at The Beacon, the private members’ yacht club in Sag Harbor, NY.

It’s rare that guests and leaders of each of the group’s retailers — Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, and Bergdorf Goodman — come together at one event. But van Raemdonck wanted to put on a unified front and introduce top clients to the newly renamed group, less than two months after Saks Global exited bankruptcy with enough financing to reinvest into the business and rebrand. In addition to the VICs, designers, retail execs and celebrity guests including Tory Burch and CEO Pierre-Yves Roussel, Andrew Rosen, Wes Gordon, Stacey Bendet, and Brooke Shields also came to support. Guests — donning designer brands like Fendi, Dior, and Michael Kors Collection — slurped oysters and sipped cocktails before sitting down for a three-course dinner.

“It’s a new day,” says van Raemdonck. “Our retailers are united by one thing: customer devotion. We care about our customers. Our mission is to create a relationship with them. So in our first year, we wanted to bring them together for this umbrella event. We have the liquidity we need. We have 75% less debt. We’ve taken a lot of action focusing on luxury, streamlining the stores. We’re ready to start the next chapter.”

Van Raemdonck, formerly the CEO of Neiman Marcus, was appointed to lead the retail group in January after former chief execs, Marc Metrick and Richard Baker, stepped down amid the bankruptcy filing. Van Raemdonck was tasked with both steering the ship out of bankruptcy — which it completed in June with $500 million in new financing — and convincing brands and customers that they could trust the group’s retailers again. Brands were owed hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid invoices; van Raemdonck says a substantial portion of financing went to paying back the brands, and the company paid more than $600 million worth of claims to hundreds of partners, which has helped to rebuild trust. He adds that once inventory is replenished, the executive hopes to win back the more casual customers, who maybe last visited a store over the holidays and noted the lack of stuff inside.

But he asserts that top customers, like the ones in the room on Thursday, “never declined as the company declined”, and sales associate revenue was up in the first six months of the year. About 1,500, he says, do more than $1 million in sales per year, and in aggregate, they bring in more than $2.8 billion in revenue. “You can’t manufacture that, or replicate it,” van Raemdonck says, which he sees as the group competitive advantage.

Guests including Brooke Shields, Tory Burch, Stacey Bendet and Andrew Rosen joined ELG in Sag Harbor on Thursday.

Why should the department store model still exist today? For luxury brands — particularly international ones — the US market is a key growth driver. “We are a conduit to that customer,” he says. “Clearly, we benefit from the tailwind that the US is a market that’s robust and growing. And I believe that’s going to stay because the economy is relatively strong. The stock market is very strong. But also there’s so many people who are entering luxury.” He references newly minted millionaires like SpaceX’s employees post-IPO. “There’s also a customer that likes the impartiality of our sales associates,” who will introduce these customers — particularly those new to luxury — to new brands.

As for the competitors, van Raemdonck singles out four pillars that make Exemplar Luxury Group’s (ELG) retail network unique: the collections, the curation, the integrated retail model, and data on 25 million luxury consumers. The collections and curation are the strength of the inventory assortment — van Raemdonck says that, together, ELG’s retailers have the biggest array of luxury brands in the US — and sales associate recommendations. The integrated retail model blends in-store, online and other forms of purchase, like a sales associate selling a piece of jewelry over Whatsapp, rather than separating them into their distinct channels. And the data will be used to personalize the customer experience, van Raemdonck says, by incorporating AI to scale white-glove services. It’s particularly important to hook new customers into becoming loyal ones.

“Some of the clients have known their sales associates for years. They’re part of the family. I want that feeling to cascade to new customers, customers who aren’t as engaged with us now, because that is the new way of luxury experience,” he says. Part of that new experience includes events, and ELG plans to continue hosting these as more retailers, from Bloomingdale’s to Mytheresa, wine and dine their top clients all over the world. It’s a costly investment for a company coming back from the brink; van Raemdonck says it comes with “long-term payback”. “We find that these investments are always profitable, and therefore we have the budget to invest behind that.”

Coming up, Bergdorf Goodman will be celebrating 125 years in business during New York Fashion Week. And van Raemdonck says to expect the comeback of Saks’s big light show this holiday season, after taking last year off. In the future, don’t expect many more joint ELG events. Van Raemdonck wants each retailer to remain distinct, noting that in markets where there’s both a Saks and a Neiman, only about 15% of customers shop both. “I think for some customers, it’s great to know that Saks is part of a bigger organization, that Neiman is part of a bigger organization,” he says. “I don’t want to take over the personality of the brands. This is more a signal that this entity that supports all the banners exists, and it’s vibrant and exciting.”

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