In this disaster, there is one unexpected victim: Amazon.
Saks and Amazon had been talking about working together for nearly a decade.48 Amazon has spent years trying to break into luxury: sponsoring the Met Gala in 2012, launching “Luxury Stores” in 2020 with Oscar de la Renta, Amazon Original series about fashion. But the big houses such as Louis Vuitton and Gucci still refuse to sell on the platform. The Saks partnership was supposed to change the game.
In December 2024, Jeff Bezos and co. invested $475M in Saks Global, or 23.2% of the capital of Saks Global Investor L.P. The idea was simple: launch “Saks on Amazon”, a luxury storefront inside the platform, with a guarantee of $900M in commissions over eight years. Amazon would bring its logistics and technology, Saks its curation and luxury expertise.
In April 2025, “Saks on Amazon” launches with Dolce & Gabbana, Balmain, Etro and Stella McCartney. By the summer, the store has done less than $100M of sales. Some encouraging signs: a fifth of customers come back within 30 days, the return rate is half that of Saks.com, and Amazon customers are younger. But Marc Metrick admits to WWD in November that it is hard to bring more big brands onto the platform.
In the months before the bankruptcy, Saks executives approach Amazon offering it either more financing or an outright takeover. Amazon says no. The Seattle giant knew the company was doomed and chose not to rescue its $475M investment.
A year after the deal, Amazon describes the investment as “presumptively worthless”.49 Oof. For a company that built its fortune on squeezing every last cent, losing half a billion on a department store must have led to a few tense meetings in Seattle.
Its formal objection to the DIP financing, filed with the Texas court, is a full-frontal attack.50 Off the record, Amazon’s lawyers don’t mince their words either:
According to Amazon, Saks has repeatedly failed to meet its budgets, burned through hundreds of millions of dollars in less than a year, and run up hundreds of millions more in unpaid bills to its retail partners.
The Fifth Avenue building, the historic flagship, is owned by Flagship PropCo51. Above it sits an intermediate holding company, HoldCo II. The classic architecture for ring-fencing and protecting the most valuable asset. Except that here, the opposite is happening.
Amazon accuses Saks of turning the building into a cash cow: first used to reassure business partners, then reused as collateral for $2.6bn of DIP financing for the benefit of the group’s other entities. The same value, milked twice.
The heart of the accusation: the DIP “roll-up”52 takes roughly $1.4bn of old debt and turns it into secured post-petition claims. An artificial creation of liability: the property assets are made to carry debts that aren’t theirs.
Amazon also points out that its contract gives it a veto over any debt touching the flagship. It never gave its consent. And it isn’t the first time Saks has ignored that veto.
On 9 January 2026, five days before the bankruptcy, Amazon had sent Saks a letter. In essence: “Given Saks’ past financial and operational performance and present uncertainties, a liquidation of Flagship may very well be in the best interests of the creditors.” Liquidating the building might be better than this DIP arrangement.
The numbers are dizzying:
Finally, governance: HoldCo II has no independent director. It is run by people who serve the group’s other entities. No decision has been taken in its own interest. Amazon talks of a structural conflict of interest. Its threat: having an “examiner” or a “trustee” appointed to oversee the bankruptcy proceedings.
In plain English: the DIP isn’t survival financing. It is a value-transfer operation that mortgages the property to bail out the group’s other debts.
On 15 January, after a 7.5-hour marathon hearing in the Houston court, the judge authorised Saks to tap $400M of interim financing.53 Amazon lost its first battle. But the war is only just beginning.
Because Amazon’s lawyers have been making plenty of quiet calls in recent weeks to gather information on the restructuring options. And when Amazon starts gathering intelligence, it is rarely good news for the other side.
All the more so since, on 14 January, Saks had made a unilateral move. On day one of the bankruptcy, the company rejected every agreement with Amazon: the October 2025 shareholders’ agreement, the December 2024 CEO agreement, the commercial partnership contract and its amendments. “Saks on Amazon”, launched 9 months earlier, didn’t survive its first year. The $475M investment and the $900M commission guarantee over eight years, wiped out with the stroke of a lawyer’s pen.
On the same list, another victim: Barneys. After the New York retailer went bankrupt in 2019, Saks had bought the licensing rights to create “Barneys at Saks” shops-in-shop. The brand now belonged to Authentic Brands Group, which is also a minority investor in Saks Global. On 14 January, Saks rejects the licence. ABG gets thrown out by a company it has invested in. Barneys dies a second time.
The icing on the cake: in a bankruptcy, ABG’s preferred equity in the joint venture that owns the Saks, Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman brands automatically converts into additional shares.54 Translation: Saks loses control of its own brands to an investor it has just thrown out. That’s what you call a well-drafted contract.
To understand how it came to this, you have to go back to the summer of 2025. That is when Saks showed how far it was prepared to go to survive.
In July, the company has to pay $120M of interest on its debt. It doesn’t have the cash. Solution: raise another $600M. But to persuade investors to put more money into a ship that is taking on water, you have to offer them something. That something is the hide of the other creditors.
The structure is vicious. A slim majority of bondholders agrees to take part in the fundraising. In exchange, their debt is converted into “senior” debt, meaning that in a bankruptcy they get paid first. The others, the ones who didn’t want to or couldn’t take part? Their bonds are pushed further down the queue. Their collateral is stripped to secure the new lenders.55
In restructuring jargon, this is called “creditor-on-creditor violence”. It is legal. The terms of the original bonds were “loose” enough to allow it. But it is brutal.
Six months later, the $600M is gone. Saks burned through it in a single half-year.56 The bonds issued in June, the ones that were supposed to be “senior”, the ones for which investors had agreed to jump the queue ahead of their peers, now trade at under 30 cents on the dollar. As one investor puts it:
“The people who put the new money in got so smoked.”
Some senior creditors, including MacKay Shields and BlackRock, refuse to put more money into the bankruptcy loan. They are afraid of throwing good money after bad.57 One creditor’s lawyer tells the Financial Times: “My clients are sick to their stomach.”
At this point, Saks is no longer a retail business. It is a financial asset. A battlefield for financiers.
The same Financial Times notes that even in the most optimistic scenario ($1bn of EBITDA in 2026, a valuation in line with Nordstrom), Baker’s equity is worth next to nothing with $5bn of debt sitting above it.58 In other words: all this financial gymnastics only serves to put off the inevitable.
According to Fitch Ratings, out of 79 recent retail bankruptcies, 34 ended in outright liquidation. Four times the rate in other sectors.
Saks bought itself six months of breathing space. Six months until the next interest payment. Six months until Christmas 2025.
But the vice tightens in December. Same script as in Canada six months earlier: Bank of America raises the minimum liquidity threshold three times in two weeks, then triggers full control of the bank accounts. We know the recipe. And at the end of December, $126M of interest falls due. Six months earlier, Saks had raised $600M to pay July’s. This time, there is nobody left to chip in.
And then there are the creditors who can smell the end coming. Axonic, a credit fund, held a put59 on CMBS bonds linked to Hudson’s Bay property, in other words the right to sell them back to Saks at a set price. In December 2025, Saks pays another $13M to push back the deadline. On 7 January 2026, as bankruptcy rumours begin to swirl, Axonic exercises the put despite the standstill agreement. Saks replies that it is “null and void”. That is what the last days before a bankruptcy look like. Creditors fighting to grab what they can, even if it means breaking agreements signed two weeks earlier. In the world of “distressed debt”, a promise has the shelf life of a flash sale.
On 2 January 2026, Marc Metrick announces his resignation.60 The thirty-year veteran throws in the towel. In a LinkedIn post, he writes:
The last few years, he writes, have been hard, and it is a tough business even in good times.
Richard Baker takes his place. CEO and Executive Chairman. The man who orchestrated all of this is now going to steer the disaster he created.
Except that... eleven days later, on 13 January 2026, Baker steps down.61
Eleven days. The anti-Midas lasted eleven days at the helm of the ship he himself had steered onto the iceberg. Even in American retail, where the average CEO has the life expectancy of a hyperactive hamster, that’s a record.
On 14 January, Saks Global files for bankruptcy. The new CEO is Geoffroy van Raemdonck. He is the former boss of Neiman Marcus, the man who steered the chain’s restructuring through its 2020 bankruptcy, when the company was buried under $5bn of debt inherited from its former private equity owners. Van Raemdonck had left at the time of the merger with Saks, thirteen months earlier, “along with certain members of the Neiman Marcus leadership team”, as the press releases coyly put it.62 He comes back with two Neiman veterans who had jumped ship at the same time: Darcy Penick and Lana Todorovich. A government in exile, hastily recalled to put out a fire started by their successor.
The reversal is complete. Baker fired (sorry: “let go”) the team that knew how to restructure, to install his own people. Thirteen months later, he calls the exiles back to clean up his ruins.
Van Raemdonck says in the press release:
This is a defining moment for Saks Global, he says, and the road ahead is a significant opportunity to strengthen the company’s foundations.
Except the building had collapsed long before. The January 2026 bankruptcy isn’t an accident. It is the culmination of a slow death that began the day Baker signed the cheque.