Neiman Marcus CEO Geoffroy van Raemdonck is photographed in front of a display of Johanna Ortiz clothing at the downtown Dallas store.
Tom Fox | The Dallas Morning News (TNS)
DALLAS — Neiman Marcus CEO Geoffroy van Raemdonck talks about love and relationships more than most top retail executives. It’s not a stretch. Neiman Marcus has been loved for more than a century, and generating enthusiasm and loyalty is part of the Dallas-based luxury retailer’s DNA.
Van Raemdonck, the team of executives he’s chosen since becoming CEO in 2019 and more than 3,000 stylists are working hard to fan the flames.
Neiman Marcus just reported its best financial results in years, and it wants to keep that momentum going.
“We’ve been able to recruit new customers and to migrate them into being loyals, and we’ve retained the same number of loyals as before COVID,” van Raemdonck said. “Our customers are going back to their social life, and that’s driving their frequency of shopping.”
A week ago at a ranch about 30 minutes south of downtown Dallas, some of those loyal customers mingled with representatives of Brunello Cucinelli, one of the retailer’s best-selling brands.
Carolina Cucinelli, co-president and co-creative director, traveled from Italy to celebrate the “Muse of the West” collection of women’s clothing made exclusively for Neiman Marcus shoppers. As Neiman Marcus president Lana Todorovich gave Cucinelli a pair of red Lucchese boots, they talked about the two institutions’ strong feelings for each other and said they were “among family.”
Van Raemdonck says luxury brands value their relationships with the store.
“Because we have the strength of the customer, we have seen the luxury brands really invest with us,” he said. “We have 600 new points of distribution with our top luxury brands. That means adding Prada leather goods or adding Dior shoes to more stores. In addition to distribution, they’re also doing exclusive things for us.”
About 75% of Neiman Marcus’ top brands have launched exclusive assortments with the retailer, he said, “because they recognize that it’s worth the investment and that when it resonates with our customers, it amplifies their brand.”
Dinner with friends
The dinner at the RoadRunner Ranch in Ferris showed off Neiman Marcus’ skill at making an event seem special. A cocktail hour was followed with a four-course dinner under the stars served by an army of waiters for synchronized plating. The wine flowed. Live country music played.
About 100 customers attended, and they were seated with representatives of Cucinelli and Neiman Marcus. They weren’t strangers to one another.
This was an event for customers and their sales associates.
Melody Akhavan, 38, of Dallas was at the dinner with Chase Cavin, her Neiman Marcus personal stylist. She followed him from Nordstrom to Neiman Marcus about a year ago.
Akhavan said Cavin has become a friend and she wants to support him with her family’s business, which includes two children ages 2 and 6.
“I historically have not been a Neiman Marcus shopper, but Chase helped us shop during the pandemic,” she said. “He’s not about pressure, and he’s exposed me to brands and experiences I wouldn’t otherwise have access to.”
For Father’s Day, Cavin pulled together looks for Akhavan’s busy husband, a surgeon who she said needed “to overhaul his wardrobe.”
Cavin set up a private room at the store for the whole family with goods to inspect and try on, food for the family and a sitter for the children.
“I’ve been a prolific shopper all my life, and I’ve never had the experiences I’m having at Neiman Marcus,” Akhavan said.
Lori Dunn, a 6-foot-1-inch lawyer from New Orleans, came to the dinner with Claudia Coleman, her Neiman Marcus personal stylist. Coleman knows what Dunn can and can’t wear.
“The ‘can’t’ part is really important to me,” said Dunn, who developed a skin allergy to wool about five years ago. “Claudia has learned my style. She weeds out what I can’t wear and don’t like, what I need for the courtroom, for relaxing on the weekends and out for an evening.”
Dunn, who was wearing a gray Cucinelli linen and silk blend sweater, said she comes to Dallas five times a year, and her mother, who lives in El Paso, joins her to shop.
Offering variety
Neither Dunn nor Akhavan is loyal to a particular brand, which brings up another reason these women value their stylists.
Neiman Marcus sells a couple of thousand brands throughout its stores and online. Some of those brands are opening their own storefronts and selling directly to customers online. A walk down the corridors leading to Neiman Marcus at NorthPark Center in Dallas illustrates the trend.
A few years ago, some believed that designer brands selling directly to consumers would end up hurting the relevance of a store that sells multiple designers. But Neiman Marcus seems to be proving them wrong.
Akhavan said her generation has been navigating brands online for years. “Now I appreciate a good edit,” she said. “These stylists are working hard.”
Dunn said she invests a lot of money in her wardrobe. She appreciated being able to again talk to Cucinelli representatives at a trunk show the morning after the ranch dinner.
“If one designer doesn’t fit me well, Neiman Marcus has the variety that allows me to stay within the luxury look,” Dunn said. “And because it’s all quality, I can wear it for years.”
After reporting the company’s financial results earlier this month, van Raemdonck answered some questions about how the company will continue to perform.
“When you look at our growth, it is pretty balanced between online and stores. Someone who shops both online and in stores is worth five time more than a customer that only shops one channel with us,” he said.
So stores remain key?
“The stores have products, experiences, services and 43 restaurants. But ultimately when we connect a customer with a sales associate, then they’re worth 12 times a customer who shops in a single channel. And that really shows you the strength of our business model, which is a relationship business model. We curate an exclusive assortment from the brands and exclusive activations.
“That’s the formula of Neiman Marcus. And it was the formula of how we were founded, but it resonates very much in today’s world.”
Schiaparelli is one of those brands that has turned to Neiman Marcus and its sister store in New York, Bergdorf Goodman, to exclusively sell the Parisian fashion house’s fall and winter collection in the U.S.
“Everyone was predicting the end of the department store,” said Schiaparelli artistic director Daniel Roseberry. “I think that’s been true with the mid-level department stores, but Neiman Marcus is so unique. It’s iconic and almost impossible to replicate.”
