A bidding war may be about to begin for Barneys New York, the beleaguered luxury department store chain that declared bankruptcy in August and became a cautionary tale of retail hubris and the death of shopping as we once knew it.
One buyer could mean the liquidation of all of the retailer’s stores, while another could preserve at least some of the Barneys shoppers know today.
On Tuesday, Authentic Brands Group, the owner of over 50 brands including Nine West, Nautica and Hickey Freeman, made a formal $264 million offer for Barneys that was accepted by the store’s lenders. That began an auction process that will take place over the next week. At least one other bidder has declared intent: a consortium of New York investors led by Sam Ben-Avraham, the co-founder of the streetwear brand Kith and owner of a group of trade shows.
The two represent starkly different visions for Barneys’ future, and reflect the shift in fashion that has taken place over the last decade. The rise of contemporary and then streetwear brands reshaped consumer wardrobes and shopping patterns, as elitism was trounced by accessibility, and brick-and-mortar emporia went from being magnetic landmarks to millstones weighing down the bottom line.
The bankruptcy judge, Cecelia G. Morris, will issue her ruling on the bids on Oct. 24.
A.B.G., which has annual revenues of $10 billion, has a deal with Hudson’s Bay Company, the owner of Saks Fifth Avenue, to license the Barneys name if it acquires the retailer. According to documents reviewed by The New York Times, A.B.G. plans to continue running the Barneys digital operation, while Saks would potentially use the Barneys name for private label collections or shop-in shops. Saks’s involvement would add a gloss of cutting-edge luxury to the Fifth Avenue retailer, allowing it to further consolidate power over the luxury department store market.
While A.B.G. has said it would try to keep Barneys stores open, especially the Madison Avenue flagship, it is prepared to close all seven of them if better rental agreements cannot be reached. It has already lined up the Great American Group to run liquidation sales. No mention was made in its offer of what would happen to current employees.
A.B.G. is essentially betting that the future of retail lies with the abstract values of brand names rather than in-person shopping experiences.
Mr. Ben-Avraham and his group, which includes his brother, Uzi Ben-Abraham (owner of the real estate company Premier Equities); Ron Roman (Bergen Logistics); Khajak Keledjian (founder and former chief executive of Intermix); Ron Burkle (Yucaipa Companies, the private equity firm that is already an investor in Barneys); and Andrew Rosen, plans to keep at least two of the remaining seven Barneys stores open, including the Madison Avenue flagship with its nine-floor footprint. It would retain at least some of the current management.
In an interview, Mr. Ben-Avraham said a team was in negotiations with all of the Barneys landlords, though no agreements have been reached. He said his group had raised $70 million in equity, with plans to raise up to $150 million, and had secured commitments for at least $200 million in debt financing.
His bet is that combining his brand of downtown cool with Barneys’ uptown chic will create a new kind of community destination. “Our specialty is creating environments people want to be part of,” he said.
Originally rumored to be the first, or so-called stalking-horse, bidder, Mr. Ben-Avraham said that he had decided to wait until he had all his financing in place. He said he was committed to trying to save the brand, which he called one of his “inspirations.”
Lawyers for Barneys were still working to finalize an agreement with its first formal bidder on Tuesday, according to a 10-minute hearing at the bankruptcy court in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. The lawyers said that they were working with buyers to “keep open the option” of a bid that would avoid liquidation and preserve jobs. They also said that it was possible that certain stores would keep operating under the terms of the initial bid.
“We expect to work through those remaining issues soon so we can have a signed purchase agreement as soon as possible,” a lawyer for Barneys said at the hearing. “These are not easy negotiations and there is a lot of posturing and pressure going on, but our options are relatively limited at this point.”
Neither A.B.G., which is run by its founder, Jamie Salter, nor Mr. Ben-Avraham has experience operating large department stores.
A.B.G., which bought the intellectual property of Sports Illustrated for $110 million in May, has built a global business on managing brand names, including the celebrity estates of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe. In 2016 it teamed up with the mall owners Simon Properties and General Growth and two liquidators to buy Aeropostale out of bankruptcy, a deal that could serve as a model for the proposed arrangement with Hudson’s Bay.
A.B.G. recently sold the right to publish Sports Illustrated to a digital company, which laid off a significant percentage of the publication’s staff this month.
Mr. Ben-Avraham began his career in the mid-1990s with the specialty boutique Atrium, a store that sold Nudie jeans next to Ralph Lauren, before founding Kith in 2011 with the designer Ronnie Fieg. It is both a multibrand retailer and one of the best-known streetwear lines.
Barneys was founded by Barney Pressman in 1923. Over the course of three generations of family ownership, it evolved from an off-price men’s suiting outlet into a symbol of a certain kind of New York style: unabashedly elitist and very expensive. It grew to encompass women’s wear, homewares and children’s wear, and was famous for its rows of black apparel and ability to crown rising fashion stars.
It became a victim of its own mythmaking, however, and declared bankruptcy in 1996. It changed hands several times after that, and was sold in 2012 to Richard Perry and his hedge fund, Perry Capital. Mr. Perry has by all accounts been an absentee owner in recent years, and has not been involved in the bankruptcy proceedings despite holding a 72 percent stake in the company and a seat on the retailer’s board.
Mr. Perry closed his hedge fund in September 2016 and has returned the vast majority of clients’ money; Barneys is one of the remaining investments it is working to unwind. Josh Hechinger, a spokesman for Mr. Perry, declined to comment.
Barneys reported sales of about $790 million last year, with 30 percent of that coming from e-commerce, according to its bankruptcy filing. The company, which had 2,300 employees when it filed for bankruptcy, said that the 15 stores it planned to close posted losses of $14.2 million last year.
The luxury chain’s challenges came to a head this year, culminating in “a liquidity crisis” by the summer. Its rent obligations jumped by $12 million while sales plummeted and vendors started refusing to ship inventory unless they were paid cash on delivery, according to the retailer’s bankruptcy documents.
Whether such concerns are resolved by the potential new owners’ plans is an open question. Others mentioned as potential bidders include Hilldun Corporation, the fashion financing company, and Mercury Group, a Russian retail and real estate group that owns TsUM department store and the Phillips auction house, according to two people with knowledge of the plans, who said they were not authorized to speak publicly.
