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If you go to Saks.com today, it may look a little different than it has in the past; a little more tailored to you. On 14 August, Saks is completing its roll out of new AI-powered personalisation features that mean each customer’s homepage will be custom-built to their taste, informed by machine learning algorithms.
The goal is to reinvent luxury shopping, says Emily Essner, president and chief commercial officer for Saks Global, the newly formed parent company of Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman. It’s a big task for a group of retailers whose heyday was a retail landscape now past. But, under the recently formed Saks Global, the team thinks it’s equipped to push its retail brands into a new phase.
“We think about doing this by delivering a luxury experience that is really curated for each and every customer,” Essner says. “And we are uniquely able to do this because not only of the scale of customers who we have and the customer data that we have, but also the richness and the depth of understanding that we have about our customers.” Across the three retailers, Saks Global has about 30 million customers in the US.
Saks Global is banking on this shopping revamp to re-establish and elevate its own position in the luxury landscape. Since its formation in July 2024, the company has had its fair share of setbacks. After successfully completing the acquisition of Neiman Marcus Group that December, Saks Global faced serious debt and tricky financing agreements that weighed on the company’s early days, along with new payment terms that mean vendors get paid far later than is typical. As of a week ago, brands still claimed to be waiting on overdue payments. On 8 August, Saks Global also announced the early closing of its $600 million after receiving $300 million in connection with its debt exchange offer, giving the company more financial leeway to accomplish its reset.
A lot is riding on Saks Global’s successful use of its hefty profile of consumer data. With the merger, the company now has access to a larger multi-brand retail audience than any other — it’s a retailer’s dream. Retailers have long pursued personalisation, an effort made further fetched for incumbent department stores as e-commerce platforms took market share — and measurable consumer activity. Now, generative AI platforms like ChatGPT are launching their own shopping tools, and companies built on the premise of personalised e-commerce (like Daydream) are pulling consumers to their own search tools. That means retailers like Saks Global need to do more to up the ante on their own personalisation offerings to keep shoppers — and their valuable data — in their domain as the AI e-commerce era flourishes.
That’s why Saks Global is not just building personalised homepages. Though unable to share specifics, Essner says that the group’s consumer data will inform users’ entire e-commerce experience across brands, and hints at ways in which it may parse over to IRL shopping experiences also (through clienteling apps; supporting in-store stylists).
The personalisation equation
Using machine learning algorithms that leverage customers’ behaviours on the e-commerce site, a customer’s Saks.com homepage content will now be curated based on their activity on the Saks website: product recommendations, editorial content, the order of items, and, down the line, the ads shoppers see will all be informed by their personal tastes, as they indicate it to the algorithm. Data science models are layered on top to generate predictions for the user’s next action, which informs what product, brand or category they’re shown first.
Of course, this taste is hard to quantify, and runs into questions about how much of a user’s preferences are shaped by what they’ve already been shown. But the hope is that by taking a customer’s granular movements (what they’re clicking; what they’re hovering over; what they’re skipping; what they’re buying) into account that, over time, their personalised results will get at what they really want to see.
It seems to be working. Prior to the rollout, 5 per cent of Saks customers already had access to this feature. The personalisation resulted in a 7 per cent increase in revenue per visitor, and improved conversion by almost 10 per cent, according to the company. “We were surprised that we saw as much uptick as we did, from a revenue per visit and conversion perspective,” Essner says.
This rollout — which is for now unique to the Saks website — is the first step in Saks Global’s wider personalisation strategy, which is at the core post-merger, Essner says. “It’s the first step for us as we think about the personalisation journey of the e-commerce experience,” she says. “It makes sense to start with the homepage: it’s the storefront to the overall experience.”
Prior to the merger, Saks was already placing emphasis on personalisation efforts. In 2024, the retailer launched the Saks Media Network, which helps brands advertise across the Saks shopping journey by leveraging first-party customer data. (This is still in play, and there will be opportunities for brands to leverage it in the context of Saks’s personalisation strategy down the line, Essner says.)
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This AI tech — developed over the last six months — is a leap forward, and will be central to all three retailers under the Saks Global umbrella, Essner says. “It certainly powers the Saks.com homepage, but it [also] powers our overall personalisation strategy, which is something that’s very well developed at the Saks Fifth Avenue retail brand and is something that we are integrating into the Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman brands,” she says.
Since the Neiman Marcus acquisition, Saks Global has made reference to the value in sharing data across the different retail brands. “We can serve customers better with this data across the brands, without oversaturation risk and without cannibalisation,” buying officer Paolo Riva told Vogue Business in June.
This cross-brand data usage isn’t in play yet — as of now, the Saks personalisation is informed by user activity on the Saks site only — but it is the plan, Essner says. “One of the things that the team is really excited to be working on is integrating the entirety of the Saks Global ecosystem,” she says. “Integrating in the understanding of the Neiman Marcus customer, integrating in the understanding of the Bergdorf Goodman customer. We’ll eventually be able to incorporate the actions and experiences of a customer at the other Saks Global properties.”
Next will be personalised homepage offerings at both Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman sites. Though these homepages will look different to Saks, Essner anticipates that the algorithm will remain consistent across the different retail brands. “The richness of data that we will have, the depth of understanding that we will have about our customer will grow as we integrate the Saks Global customer base into the existing customer DNA,” she says. “But the core algorithm probably does stay the same because the experience is largely very similar.”
Saks Global will work with brands to provide insights into where — and with whom — they’re resonating the most, Essner says. While brands won’t have access to the full suite of consumer data, she believes they’ll benefit from Saks Global’s ability to identify and reach their target customers. “What’s most important for our brand partners is being able to identify the exact right customers for their brand,” she says.
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