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Saks Global filed for bankruptcy in January and walked out the other side in under six months. It now calls itself Exemplar Luxury Group. The name is new. The balance sheet problem is the one it always had.

Start with the debt, because that was the whole story. Saks bought Neiman Marcus in late 2024 for $2.7B and loaded the company to do it. By the time it filed, Saks Global carried $3.4B in debt, and the figure excluded a $1.25B mortgage on the Fifth Avenue flagship plus another $428M tied to Hudson’s Bay properties. The debt-fueled Neiman acquisition always pointed toward bankruptcy court. That was the ending from the day the deal closed.

The company cut that load to roughly $1.2B. In its releases it claims a reduction of as much as 75 percent. The cleaner figure is closer to 65 percent, since the bigger number folds in other financing. What remains is a $750M term loan and a $347M asset-based loan. That pile is still large enough to keep Exemplar from investing in the stores themselves.

That matters, because the stores took the deepest cut. Saks Global ran more than 150 locations before the filing. Exemplar will run 49. The full-line Saks Fifth Avenue fleet was halved to 15. Saks Off 5th lost about 70 stores and its entire eCommerce site. Neiman’s Last Call is gone. A few closures raise questions. Shutting the Michigan Avenue flagship in Chicago is the one that stands out, a store that might have underperformed because it was badly stocked.

Here is the part worth watching. Exemplar gutted its off-price business and plans to replace that volume with full-price luxury. The obvious question writes itself: you expect to swap off-price volume for full-price volume, at margin, and call that a plan? Nordstrom is doing the opposite. Rack is its biggest engine for new customers, and Nordstrom keeps expanding it.

The vendors came back, which is the one piece of real good news. Geoffroy van Raemdonck, back in the CEO seat, rebuilt the supplier count past 700. Last year those vendors withheld inventory over missed payments and left racks bare, and the company estimates that cost it $550 million in receipts in the second half alone. The relationships are patched for now. Many suppliers want payment up front.

Then there is Richard Baker, the real estate operator who assembled this and now runs none of it. Mark Cohen, who ran retail studies at Columbia Business School, did not soften it. He says Baker has treated retail as a series of transactions, and that the businesses he took over came out weaker than they went in. Saks and Neiman were not thriving when Baker arrived. They were worse off by the time he left.

Exemplar says it will turn profitable in three years and reach $9 billion in gross merchandise value by 2030. Those are projections. The debt is real, the store count is real, and the bet on full-price-only luxury is the piece nobody outside the building seems to believe.

Saks Global emerged leaner, with debt down to roughly $1.2B and store count cut hard, and that part of the plan worked. The harder part is still ahead: replacing a gutted off-price business with full-price luxury volume, at margin, while $1.2B in debt limits what the company can spend to fix the stores themselves.

The numbers Exemplar is promising for 2030 are projections, and the bet underneath them is one the rest of the industry is watching with open skepticism.

Starbucks just turned its baristas into an ad inventory line. That is the real story behind the TikTok deal announced at Cannes last week.

The mechanics are straightforward. Starbucks becomes the first brand to pilot a custom Creator Network inside TikTok's Content Suite, building on the Green Apron Creators program it started in 2024. Employees already posting about the job can now receive briefs and a cut of ad revenue when their videos run as paid placements. The pilot starts this summer.

Watch the framing. Starbucks says its partners post at three times the rate of comparable chains, a figure that comes from its own press materials, not an audit. Sprout Social supplies the demand-side number: it reports 61% of Gen Z say they often discover products through employee content. Useful, but it is a vendor selling the category it is measuring.

Here is what the deal actually solves. Starbucks spent years building goodwill content for free. Now it has a structure to pay for the best of it and push that footage into media buys, which is cheaper than producing polished spots.

The question nobody answered in Cannes: what happens to "authentic" barista content the moment a brief and a paycheck are attached to it.

The real move is structural: Starbucks built a way to pay for barista content it used to get free and run it as paid media, which is cheaper than producing polished spots.

The supporting numbers come from interested parties, Starbucks on the supply side and Sprout Social on the demand side, so treat them as positioning rather than proof. What stays unanswered is whether content keeps working once a brief and a paycheck are attached to it.