SaksWorks Turns Your Favorite Department Store Into a Co-working Space (original) (raw)

Once upon a time, all the Lord & Taylor stores in the land were going to become WeWorks. That didn’t come to fruition, but Saks Fifth Avenue and its owner, Hudson’s Bay Company, swooped in to save the day with something similar but better in mind: SaksWorks. The luxury retailer will launch five Saks-branded co-working hubs in the northeast this September in New York City; Manhasset, Long Island; Greenwich, Connecticut; and Eastchester, New York, with expansion plans on the horizon. The Vesey Street location, inside the Brookfield Place mall in Lower Manhattan, was formerly Saks’s Men’s Store; the other Manhattan locale is within the Saks flagship on Fifth Avenue. The three other SaksWorks are housed in freestanding former Lord & Taylor stores, fulfilling the promise of rethinking abandoned retail space as the membership club of the future.

On a sweltering summer Wednesday, I made the trek from _Vogue_’s offices in 1 World Trade Center across the West Side Highway to SaksWorks’s Brookfield Place location. (Travel time: seven minutes, door-to-door, walking in sneakers.) Located at a nexus of finance, media, and technology offices, SaksWorks’s Downtown hub has the promise to give hybrid-work employees an oasis from both their small apartments and open-plan offices. With a membership cost of $299 a month, a BDY SQD stretching studio, Balthazar pastries, and drip coffee—and even more perks on the docket like childcare and complementary mani-pedis—the SaksWorks concept re-skins the standard co-working meeting place with the sheen of one of fashion’s most legendary shops. It’s not just taking a Zoom call from the conference room at SaksWorks; it’s sitting among the fine-art and fashion books, set into bookshelves repurposed from Saks suiting displays.

Photo: Courtesy of SaksWorks

While the air of fashion and fashionable people looms large over the space, the first thing you’ll notice when you enter are the vegetables. Hydroponic gardens frame the space’s two entryways, with herbs, bok choy, and butter lettuce being planted as I arrive. Members will receive bundles of greens when they are ready to be picked.

The second thing you’ll notice is the smell. It’s a proprietary blend with notes of sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet iris not unlike a popular fragrance of the downtown set that describes itself as “an olfactive form inspired by the great American myth.” Inside SaksWorks, the new great American myth is that you can work where you play, play where you hang, and hang where you shop. The space is rendered with moveable furniture so its interior space is entirely modular. The layout can change at the drop of a Stephen Jones hat, with a work setup instantly reformed into a lecture space or a party locale with an open bar. (Liquor license forthcoming!) Its Fifth Avenue location, sandwiched between the retail floors and L’Avenue, could toy with retail within SaksWorks—or at least deliveries of e-commerce purchases within the SaksWorks space.

Photo: Courtesy of SaksWorks

The aesthetic of SaksWorks isn’t exactly like Saks, nor is it like WeWork, which is not a partner in the venture but whose proprietary “experience management platform” will power the SaksWorks locations in a first-of-its-kind deal for the beleaguered co-working company. (SaksWorks and WeWork members will also have access to both SaksWorks and WeWork workspaces for a limited time.) In its current form, SaksWorks is somewhere in between an office of the future and a luxury members club, not as dark or haunted by Gossip Girl 2.0 characters as Soho House nor as devoted to Euro-minimalism and industrial architecture as NeueHouse. Instead, lively art lines the walls and the interiors of the space are lit with glowing prisms in gradient colors to emphasize a bright, friendly, collaborative mood. “It feels like your friend’s house, a really beautiful home,” Amy Nelson, the president of SaksWorks, tells me on my tour.

To optimize work vibes, there are conference rooms that easily access Zoom and modular phone booths from Room for single and four-person use. And to optimize chill vibes, there is the guarantee that everyone inside a SaksWorks is probably here for either luxury fashion or luxury work. It’s an interesting proposition: Work has been anything but luxe, especially after a thankless pandemic year, and this vaccination-required space promises an office as serene as the dressing room inside Saks Fifth Avenue.

Photo: Courtesy of SaksWorks

Nelson has a personal investment in creating a peaceful flex workspace, she tells me as we saunter through the space. She has four young daughters and is tired of cycling through Zoom calls from her closet or bathroom, the only private spaces in her home. She’s not alone; a 2020 study by McKinsey estimated that 20% of the workforce could soon work remote for three to five days a week. That 20% is likely to look for a third place—not home and not an office—to work, network, and maybe even work out.

“I think we took the best of that blurring of work and home, where you can work out with a nice shower and a sauna for 30 minutes in the middle of the day and then go back to meetings,” Nelson says. “I think that’s what we’ll demand in the future. I don’t think anybody wants to go into an office. That’s just a desk, being there for eight hours a day, and then commuting an hour home; we’ve proven that we don’t need to do that anymore.”

For one of Manhattan’s—and thus the world’s—preeminent department stores to branch into this hybrid live-work space shouldn’t be surprising. As Nelson reminds me, Saks has been breaking the boundaries of what a store can be since its start. Adam Gimbel, the president from 1926 into the 1960s, intended for the store to resemble a very “elegant house,” meaning a place where your car was idling outside (handsome valet at the wheel), your Champagne was chilled (post-Prohibition, at least), and every shoe was available in your size. In the ’20s he opened a salon in the store for women to bob their hair; in the ’40s, he opened a photo studio for family portraits with soldiers as they departed for war.

A 1974 issue of Vogue notes that Saks also had its own “softball team, choral group, and ‘Rock-on Five’ band,” with writer Blair Sabol concluding, “This isn’t a store, it’s a university.” An employee at the time affirmed the communal sentiment, adding, “Saks instills in you a sense of belonging and loyalty.” In 2008, writer Amy Ephron declared that she could “tell my life by Saks.”

Photo: Courtesy of SaksWorks

SaksWorks strengthens that bond between life and brand. Even though my tour occurred before SaksWorks officially opened to its hundreds-strong wait list, the Saks and HBC employees who guided me through were the largest group of strangers I’d met in well over a year. After ticking the boxes of our walk-through, the conversation fell instantly back into the familiar: celebrity gossip, beauty products, outfit recommendations. It’s surprising how quickly a group of women and men you just met can become confidantes. For people struggling to readjust to reemergence, a co-working space offers a neat sanctuary of manageable social interaction—especially in the suburbs, where subway run-ins and sidewalk chitchat aren’t as popular as in Manhattan.

Hudson’s Bay Company executive chairman and CEO Richard Baker sees this as SaksWorks’s ultimate offer. “Our initial vision and our continued vision for SaksWorks was to be able to create a place where there was community and where you can have healthy and high-quality relationships,” he tells me over a Zoom call broadcast in a SaksWorks conference room. “If we can someday have a network of a million members at SaksWorks, people could find community, friendship, a common purpose. Then I think we would have accomplished a tremendous amount.”

A retail store turned hangout lounge is, in its essence, what every department store has been trying to do since, well, forever. First they lured husbands with velvet settees; then cliques with posh restaurants serving thin, greasy fries and tall, slender cocktails; and then partiers with exclusive after-hours events. A place for like-minded aesthetes to continue to shop, think, collaborate, and relax is the logical next step—and the potential seems endless. The Saks of the future could be a one-stop shop for our blended live-work lifestyles.

Of course with any members club, the right crowd and the right mood depend on a fickle calculus of energies. Who will the people be who flock to SaksWorks: Financiers? Fashion lovers? Full-time employees tired of WFH or part-time creatives looking to meet entrepreneurs? Time will tell, but unlike most untested membership propositions, this one already has a built-in audience of customers, clients, and fans who understand the Saks promise.