MILAN, ITALY – SEPTEMBER 26: Models walk finale of the runway at the BruceGlen fashion show during Milan Fashion Week Womenswear Spring/Summer 2026 on September 26, 2025 in Milan, Italy. (Photo by Justin Shin/Getty Images) By Andrea Bossi ·Updated March 11, 2026 Getting your Trinity Audio player ready…

There’s never been an “easy” time to run a fashion brand, and that’s truer than ever in 2026. Already, we’ve seen our favorite designers decide to pause, while others have had to cancel production for the entire season’s worth of garments. Trump’s topsy-turvy tariffs don’t help keep anything stable. And to top it all off, Saks Global — the parent company of the U.S. department luxury store triad — filed for bankruptcy mid-January. Behind the scenes, Black designers were more than on edge.

For long, department stores like Saks Fifth Avenue and Barneys (RIP) offered a clear >alienating vendors with payment terms that, in the past, kept getting longer and longer. Saks, for example, once had terms to pay its vendors 30 days after receiving inventory. Eventually, that tripled to 90 days, still the payment terms today.

“No business works that way, you know. You have all these upfront costs,” Glen Proctor, of BruceGlen, tells ESSENCE. Their womenswear brand, known for its vivacious colors and unmissable bold prints, used to sell at Saks for years until the twin founders made the tough decision to stop shipping early 2025. “When we were [working with] Saks, it always felt like family. It always felt very inclusive and felt very considerate. They were always working with us, and the buyers were so wonderfully nice,” Glen says. But that didn’t change the strain of frequently being paid late.

PARIS, FRANCE – JANUARY 16: A model walks the runway during the Heron Preston Menswear Fall/Winter 2020-2021 show as part of Paris Fashion Week At le Carreau Du Temple on January 16, 2020 in Paris, France. (Photo by Kay-Paris Fernandes/Getty Images)

Despite the opportunity of being stocked at Saks and the legitimacy that gives a brand, hidden costs behind the scenes can make it a harsh reality. Paying production costs upfront, handling possible chargebacks, and shipping to the department store all add up to a pretty penny that’s challenging to afford, especially without adequate financial backing. The intense financials it takes to sell to Saks can negatively affect all indie brands, including Black-founded ones. It has led designers to question how to strengthen their own brands, a trend happening across the industry at large, as indies develop their direct-to-consumer channels and seek more intentional retailer partnerships.

This is what led Fisayo Che, founder of Nigerian-inspired womenswear brand Elisamama, to stop shipping to Saks. She started working with Saks in 2023, and the department store eventually accounted for at least 50% of its total business, per Modern Retail. Merely two years later, in 2025, Saks wasn’t paying on time. She has lost six figures because of this and stopped shipping. “We have an order sitting in our warehouse that we’re supposed to send to them in the next couple of weeks. But we already decided that we won’t. The only way we will send it is if they pay first,” she told Modern Retail.

Saks owed massive companies like Chanel and Kering hundreds of millions of dollars. Quietly, indie brands like Elisamama suffered, owed less, but hit harder.

Bruce and Glen’s story into Saks started like a dream come true. On the Proctor twins’ 35th birthday in 2020, while celebrating on the picturesque Virgin Islands, they had a call scheduled with Saks. The retailer’s team initiated their first purchase order from BruceGlen of around $100,000, according to the designers. “It was a huge launch,” Bruce says. “We had a huge standalone display in the middle of the floor.”

Soon, reality set in: the twins had to finance producing that $100,000-worth of merchandise to ship to Saks. “We scrounged that money up,” Glen says, and they made it work. “Being in Saks validated our brand to other people. If people walk up to us and say, ‘Oh, you’re a designer, where are you sold?’ The moment we say Saks, it brings credibility.”

The two were already going through a lot of personal transitions in 2024 and 2025, but they also saw the writing on the wall as payments became later and later — this was during Marc Metrick’s tenure at the helm of Saks. This flurry of conditions led the brothers to make the tough choice to pull back and stop shipping. 

NEW YORK, NEW YORK – FEBRUARY 08: A model walks the runway, fashion detail, for Christopher John Rogers during New York Fashion Week: The Shows at Gallery I at Spring Studios on February 08, 2020 in New York City. (Photo by Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images for NYFW: The Shows)

“It would have been hard for us had we not had our production partners,” Bruce says. When they started shipping to Saks, they fronted the cost of merchandise from their factories. Later, the brand worked with a production team in the Dominican Republic that, essentially, handled upfront costs to produce wholesale orders and didn’t get paid until the brand’s purchase order payments came through. 

ESSENCE tried contacting several Black-owned brands currently in-stock at Saks — like Who Decides War, Christopher John Rogers, LaQuan Smith, and Andrea Iyamah — but most declined to comment on their experiences. Some labels not previously mentioned that declined to comment cited anxieties that speaking about what they’ve dealt with, albeit challenging, may sour the relationship.

To be clear, Saks is still a beacon for designers and brands who want their products to be stocked on the shelves of an iconic North American brand. Its role in the fashion ecosystem remains vital.

“The success of a company like Saks Global, like Neiman Marcus and [Bergdorf Goodman], is critically important to the luxury fashion ecosystem and can be especially valuable to emerging designers, including Black designers, because it can provide an entrée at scale and national presence that’s very difficult to do without a platform that substantial,” Neil Brown, CEO of Amsale, told ESSENCE. Amsale Aberra, his late wife, was a profoundly talented designer focused on bridalwear and the first Black woman designer elected to join the Council of Fashion Designers of America. The brand, which has its boutique in NYC’s SoHo neighborhood, has sold with Saks for more than three decades.

Saks Global is now doing what it can to rebuild its business and rebuild its relationships. A chapter 11 bankruptcy is, after all, about restructuring and reorganizing a business so that it might keep going. The parent company told The Business of Fashion. The wholesale financing firm has worked with hundreds of fashion brands, many of which are stocked stores within the Saks Global portfolio.

Already, nearly 500 brands on the retail company’s roster have started shipping to Saks again.

“Throughout the chapter 11 process, we are focused on the steady progress we are making in rebuilding trust with our brand partners and strengthening these relationships to drive our business in service of our customers,” a Saks Global spokesperson tells ESSENCE. The company’s newly appointed CEO Geoffroy van Raemdonck is spearheading this process.

“We remain actively engaged in productive discussions with our brand partners to drive growth for both established and emerging brands. This process will not deter our commitment to cultivating a welcoming and inclusive experience for diverse communities across Saks Global,” the spokesperson adds. 

Ahead, brands will have to continue navigating a retail scene and economy riddled with uncertainty. DTC offers its own opportunity, and so does partnering with a department store giant. After all, as they reflected on their years-long run with Saks, Bruce and Glen say, looking back, “there were truly a lot of really wonderful things about being a part of it.”

The post These Black Designers Chased The Saks Dream. Now They’re Owed Six Figures appeared first on Essence.

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