Zenobia Taylor-Braun had high hopes in 2021 when she started selling her artisanal jams to Saks Off 5th, the off-price sister brand to Saks Fifth Avenue. For a small-business owner like her, access to the luxury retailer’s stores seemed like a prestigious step forward.
But Ms. Taylor-Braun’s excitement soon gave way to frustration about missed payments. She was forced to hound Saks to pay its invoices, she said, and when she finally received payment, six to eight months later, it was often less than what she was owed.
“We were sold a lot of empty promises,” Ms. Taylor-Braun, who runs Cellar Door Preserves, based in Grand Rapids, Mich., said.
She severed ties with Saks last year and wrote off hundreds of dollars in losses. “It would take quite a bit of convincing for me to ever work with them again,” she said.
The Saks brand’s ailing relationship with vendors, a problem years in the making, is one of the many challenges shadowing the company as it tries to shore up its finances, re-establish trust with suppliers and convince investors and consumers that a $2.7 billion deal to buy a longtime rival was worthwhile.
Six months after Saks acquired Neiman Marcus, the combined company — Saks Global — is trying to assure bondholders that the tie-up they helped fund puts the luxury giant on firmer financial footing.
The latest test came on Monday, the due date for an initial $120 million interest payment to creditors, tied to a $2.2 billion, five-year bond issue that Saks used to finance the Neiman Marcus deal. Saks made the payment on time, according to a source close to the company, despite jitters among some investors leading up to the deadline.
Efforts to strengthen the privately held company’s balance sheet continue. On Friday, Saks said it had reached a deal with its existing bondholders for $600 million in new financing commitments. The agreement will increase the company’s liquidity and reflects creditors’ “continued confidence in our business and strategic direction,” the chief executive, Marc Metrick, said in a statement.
Saks executives have long promoted the Neiman Marcus deal — which includes Bergdorf Goodman — as a so-called transformative event that could remake and strengthen the luxury retail sector in the United States. A combined company would reduce costs and bolster the department store brands.
“We are setting this balance sheet the right way,” Mr. Metrick told The New York Times. “I think people need to see that, and I’m looking forward to showing them.”
Still, Saks has a long way to go to restore trust. Its challenges run much deeper than making one interest payment, retail analysts said. In May, S&P Global Ratings put Saks on negative credit watch over concerns about its liquidity. On a call with creditors, Saks said it had an adjusted loss of more than $100 million in the last fiscal year, which ended Feb. 1.
The bonds tied to the Neiman Marcus deal, due in 2029, have tanked in value since the transaction closed in December. Equity investments from Amazon and Salesforce also helped fund the deal.
“It’s the ongoing deadlines and obligations that are the issue at hand,” said Mark Cohen, a former head of retail studies at Columbia Business School. “It’s unprecedented for brand-new debt to be viewed this suspiciously, this quickly,” Mr. Cohen added.
Frederico Carvalho, the lead Saks analyst at S&P Global Ratings, said that whether the retailer could reach financial stability would depend on its ability to leverage the acquisition of Neiman Marcus to its advantage.
“Going forward, the company is larger, it’s way larger. They’ll have a broader reach to consumers,” Mr. Carvalho said. But, he added, “ “I think what’s the biggest challenge, and what’s preventing them, is the liquidity issues.”
Strategic decisions, including fallout from the Neiman Marcus deal and tensions with disgruntled vendors, are a big part of Saks’s hurdles. Some vendors will no longer sell to Saks and may work with other department stores instead, said Amanda O’Neill, a retail analyst for S&P Global Ratings. “It’s very hard to compete when you don’t have the inventory to do so,” she said.
In February, Mr. Metrick outlined how Saks planned to pay back suppliers. Past-due payments would be made in 12 installments, starting in July. In May, the company said it was making “significant headway” in rebuilding vendor relationships and increasing inventory.
And in an internal company memo viewed by The Times, Mr. Metrick said on Friday that the company would consider accelerating the timeline for past-due payments should inventory improve over the next few months.
But broader pressures on the retail sector are adding to the luxury giant’s woes. President Trump’s tariff policies could raise the cost of imports from European Union countries, where many of the retailer’s products originate. Consumer sentiment and spending are down, as households grow anxious about the U.S. economy.
That anxiety is affecting Saks’s high-income customers, too. A typical luxury shopper has disposable income, but even those with means are pulling back on spending and would balk at higher prices, Mr. Cohen said.
Despite cash flow concerns, frustrated vendors and macroeconomic pressures, some in the retail industry remain optimistic about Saks. Gary Wassner, the chief executive of Hilldun, a finance company that guarantees orders for dozens of brands that ship to Saks, said company executives had assured him that everything would be fine and that he would continue to be paid.
He said he expected cost savings from the Neiman Marcus acquisition to start to appear within months, helping the combined company dominate the luxury retail market. Mr. Wassner said every brand he worked with planned to keep doing business with Saks, with those vendors willing to accept delayed payments if that yielded a profitable company.
“Considering their space in the market and the fact that there are so few competitors, they have a wide-open playing field here to turn the company around,” he said.
Danielle Kaye is a Times business reporter and a 2024 David Carr Fellow, a program for journalists early in their careers.
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