Ropes & Gray Advises HBC, Parent Company to Saks Fifth Avenue and Hudson’s Bay, in Partnership with Insight Partners to Launch Saks as a Standalone Ecommerce Company

Ropes & Gray represented HBC, the holding company of Saks Fifth Avenue, Hudson’s Bay, and Saks OFF 5^th,  in a partnership with Insight Partners to establish Saks Fifth Avenue’s ecommerce business as a standalone entity. The entity will be known as Saks.com. The transaction was announced in a press release. 

Insight Partners has made a $500 million minority equity investment in Saks, valuing the business at $2 billion. The retailer’s 40-store fleet will operate separately as an entity referred to as SFA, which remains wholly owned by HBC. As separate but related sister companies, Saks and SFA will be better able to appropriately plan for and invest in their respective service models. 

The team advising HBC was led by mergers & acquisitions partner Jason Freedman (San Francisco). It included IP transactions partner Edward Black (Boston), tax partner Leo Arnaboldi (New York), finance partner Leo Klingbaum (New York), benefits partner Megan Bisk (Boston), real estate partner Richard Gordet (Boston), litigation & enforcement partner Randall Bodner (Boston) and privacy & data security partner Edward McNicholas (Washington, D.C.). The team also included counsel Milap Patel (Boston), Ellen Sueda (San Francisco), Benjamin Rhode (Chicago), James Kaplan (Boston) and Erica Han (Boston).