Saks Fifth Ave

Saks Fifth Avenue (colloquially Saks) is an American luxury department store chain founded in 1867 by Andrew Saks. The first store opened in the F Street shopping district of Washington, D.C., and expanded into Manhattan with its Herald Square store in 1902. Saks was bought by the Gimbels department store chain in 1923 and expanded nationwide during this ownership, and opened its flagship store on Fifth Avenue in 1924. Gimbels and Saks were acquired by Brown & Williamson in 1973, and transferred to sister company Batus Inc. in 1980. While Gimbels was liquidated in 1987, Saks was sold to Investcorp in 1990. Saks Off 5th was established as a Saks clearance store the same year, and has since evolved into an off-price store chain. Saks was acquired by Proffitt's, Inc. (renamed Saks, Inc.) in 1998.

Saks, Inc. was acquired by the Hudson's Bay Company in 2013. Saks and Saks Off 5th were spun-off into Saks Global, and consequently became sister brands with department stores Bergdorf Goodman and Neiman Marcus, in 2024. Current expansions beyond the United States include the Middle East, while previous expansions include Mexico through a franchising agreement with Grupo Sanborns from 2007 until 2023, and Canada through whole ownership from 2016 until 2025.

Early history

Andrew Saks was born to a German Jewish family, in Baltimore, Maryland. He worked as a peddler and paper boy before moving to Washington, D.C., where at the age of only 20, and in the still-chaotic and tough economic times of 1867, two years after the United States prevailed in the American Civil War, he established a men's clothing store with his brother Isadore. A. Saks & Co. occupied a storefront in the Avenue House Hotel building at 517 (300–308) 7th Street, N.W., in what is still Washington's downtown shopping district. Saks offered his goods at one price only, no bargaining, and offered refunds on merchandise returns, neither of which were the more common practice at that place and time. Saks was also known for its "forceful and interesting, but strictly truthful" newspaper advertising, according to the Washington '' Evening Star'', including a two-page spread, large for that time, in that newspaper on April 4, 1898. Saks annexed the store next door, and in 1887 started building a large new store on the site of the old Avenue Hotel Building at 7th and Market Space (now United States Navy Memorial Plaza).

By 1896, Saks and Co. had stores in Norfolk and Richmond, Virginia; New York City; and Indianapolis, in addition to Washington, D.C., where, Saks called itself "Washington's Wonderful Store".

20th century history

Saks opened a very large store in 1902 in New York City's Herald Square on 34th Street and Broadway. Andrew Saks ran the New York store as a family business with his brother Isadore, and his sons Horace and William. Andrew Saks died in 1912 and his son Horace took over the company's management.

Gimbels ownership

In 1923, Saks & Co. merged with Gimbel Brothers, Inc., which was owned by a cousin of Horace Saks, Bernard Gimbel, operating as a separate autonomous subsidiary. On September 15, 1924, Horace Saks and Bernard Gimbel opened in the Saks Fifth Avenue Building at 611 Fifth Avenue, with a full-block avenue frontage south of St. Patrick's Cathedral, facing what would become Rockefeller Center. The architects were Starrett & van Vleck, who developed a design derived from classical architecture.

When Bernard's cousin, Adam Gimbel, became president of Saks Fifth Avenue in 1926 after Horace Saks's sudden death, the company expanded, opening seasonal resort branches in Palm Beach (1926), Atlantic City (1927), Lincoln Road in Miami Beach (1929), Southampton on Long Island (1931), Newport, Rhode Island (1935), Sun Valley, Idaho and Westbury, L.I. (1936), and Greenwich, Connecticut (1937).See citations at Timeline of Saks Fifth Avenue branches

In 1929, Saks opened its first full-line, year-round flagship store in Chicago, and only six years later moved to a larger location. By the end of the 1930s, Saks Fifth Avenue had a total of 10 stores – the 2 large urban flagships in New York and Chicago, and 8 resort stores.

During World War Two, Saks opened Navy and Army shops in New Haven, Connecticut and Princeton, New Jersey, and after the war turned the small branches into University Shops, catering to the Ivy League communities there. More University Shops would open, one near Harvard in Cambridge, Mass., another in Ann Arbor, Michigan (1960). Saks had already opened two urban flagship stores before the U.S. joined the war: its now-legendary store in Beverly Hills, and in Detroit (1940). After the war, three more downtown stores opened, albeit smaller in scale: Pittsburgh (1949), Philadelphia (1952) and San Francisco (1952) where Saks competed head-on with local luxury champion I. Magnin.

During the 1950s, the shift from downtown shopping to suburban shopping malls gained momentum. Saks Fifth Avenue's first anchor department store in a mall in 1954, at Sunrise Center, now The Galleria at Fort Lauderdale. A few of the new suburban stores were freestanding in suburbs that had a significant downtown shopping district, such as in White Plains, New York (1954) and both Garden City, Long Island and Surfside, near Miami in 1962. A few were in malls built in downtowns, such as New Orleans, Boston, and Minneapolis. But most new Saks stores, dozens, opened in malls over the decades through the 1990s.

Acquisition by Brown & Williamson and Batus

More expansion followed through in the 1990s particularly into Texas, Florida and California. Plans to open in Mexico City were also scrapped following the Mexican peso crisis in 1995. the store was set to open at the Molière222 mall in Polanco, El Palacio de Hierro then took over the site where they still operate. California-based I. Magnin closed in 1995, allowing Saks to acquire some of their locations and open in San Diego's Fashion Valley and expand in Carmel. As in the 1950s, the company opened a wave of smaller "Main Street" stores in suburbs with downtown shopping, such as Pasadena, Santa Barbara, and San Diego's La Jolla in California, and in Greenwich, Connecticut, and Charleston, South Carolina. In Texas, Saks acquired three Texas locations where Marshall Fields was exiting. In 1997 Saks moved its main Houston store from the Saks Pavilion to The Galleria

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