For Emily Essner, president and chief commercial officer of Saks Global, making its luxury offering stand out in a crowded market comes down to personalization.
“We call this the art of you. That is the core of our strategy,” she told WWD during a conversation with William P. Lauder at the WWD Beauty CEO Summit. “When we think about what is luxury today, it really is how do we create an experience that is distinctly right for each and every one of our customers?”
Noting that there are 30 million luxury consumers in the United States, Essner spoke of the scale of Saks Global as a key competitive advantage. “My guess is pretty much all of them are our customers, which gives us an incredible wealth of data,” she said. “And we’re very sophisticated in using this to be able to really identify exactly that right experience for each and every customer.”
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Nevertheless, Saks, which completed its acquisition of Neiman Marcus Group in December with participation from Amazon, is navigating the luxury segment amid a backdrop of economic uncertainty, which Essner said historically, has been one of the worst enemies to the luxury sector.
“Uncertainty, not understanding where the stock market is going, hearing lots and lots of noise, is not helpful. But what we are seeing, and this is very early, is that at least for a segment of luxury consumers because of the scale of noise, because of the scale of uncertainty, we think they might be tuning it out,” she told Lauder. “So some of those historic correlations or historic relationships may no longer be relevant, but very, very much too soon to tell,” she said.
Elsewhere in the conversation, Essner addressed Saks’ payment issues, with multiple vendors not having been paid over the last 24 months. That is now being addressed. “All the payments that we have promised we have made,” she said. “We continue to do so. Receipts are at 2023 levels. We are very soon going to be closing the chapter of this as part of our story.”
As for what Saks is looking for in terms of beauty brand partnerships, she stressed that once again it comes down to personalization and experiences.
“What are the launches? What are the exclusives? What are the ways in which we really take that incredible offering of our brand partners, and make it really unique and really special for our clients,” she said.
A key part of this means making sure the consumer has a reason to shop at Saks versus its compeitors.
“We think about the model very much holistically. We have an incredible store network, 71 stores in the best locations, and we’re very lucky to have built that up for over a century in some locations, but we also have, collectively, the most important luxury e-commerce platform in the country, so 700 million visits across our platforms, and that’s something we are together really focused on integrating,” she said.
“When you think about the importance of experience and the importance of physicality, we offer some of the best aestheticians and makeup artists in the country,” she continued. “So you’re able to go to a store, engage in a luxurious experience, have a world-class treatment, and do it in a way that feels totally personalized. Once you go and you have that fabulous facial, we follow up with you and remind you how to use the products that you purchased or to purchase when that time comes. We really think of the two as working together, and there’s so many opportunities, certainly digitally, to make sure.”
In terms of differentiating between Saks and Neiman Marcus post-acquisition, it is not something she obsesses over. “Sometimes that can be a business school concept, that in reality, what we find is what consumers really want is not that they’re necessarily different, it’s that they are fully realized versions of themselves.”