Richard Baker: The man who couldn't save Saks and Hudson's Bay

In the turmoil surrounding iconic North American department stores, one name has repeatedly surfaced in recent months: Richard Baker. Under the leadership of the current Galeria investor, the Canadian department store chain Hudson’s Bay was forced to close after more than 355 years, and the luxury department store group Saks Global filed for bankruptcy. The list of Saks' creditors read like a 'who's who' of the fashion industry, from Chanel to Kering.

Did the scion of a US real estate dynasty acquire one historic department store chain after another over the past two decades merely to extract the value of their properties, or was there more to it? A dive into his biography.

Real estate scion with business acumen

The 60-year-old CEO of the US investment firm NRDC Equity Partners was born into a wealthy real estate dynasty. An excerpt from a 2011 profile in The New York Times vividly illustrates the family's wealth.

In addition to homes in Greenwich and Palm Beach, Florida, his father Robert Baker owned a sprawling apartment on New York's Fifth Avenue and 63rd Street. The living room featured paintings by high-priced artists such as Degas and Motherwell. From there, the founder of the real estate company National Realty & Development Corporation had a view of the Central Park Zoo. He could watch seals and polar bears, as well as the enclosure with the king penguin named Robert, after him. This naming was made possible by donations from family members, including his son Richard.

Baker's commercial sense was evident from an early age. He did not excel in school grades or sports, but he founded a catering business after attending a Parisian cooking school during his high school years. “He was more interested in the business than in being captain of the basketball team,” his father told The New York Times about his son. “He made money to make money.”

Richard Baker and his brother were introduced to world of real estate early on. At weekends, their father took them to the family's core business: strip malls, typical US shopping centres with large car parks outside the cities. They would look at land that Baker Senior wanted to buy or was currently developing.

A pleaser in the tough world of real estate

Richard Baker says he always found the real estate business interesting, but he wanted to do things differently. In the traditional tribal culture of the real estate world, business knowledge is passed down from one generation to the next, Baker explained in a YouTube conversation with Willy Walker, the CEO of real estate lender Walker & Dunlop. The industry had a strong transaction-focused mentality because most deals were one-off property transactions. Baker felt a service mentality was lacking.

He recalls his teenage years when, at the age of twelve, he enjoyed cooking for people. Even today, he still enjoys hosting large groups. He is always the one running back and forth with the food and serving people, he said in the webcast with Walker & Dunlop: “I'm a pleaser, I like to make other people happy.” Fittingly, he later studied hotel management at Cornell University in the US.

After graduation, he was given an office by Baker Senior and began working at the family business, National Realty & Development Corp. His father warned him not to spend any money or sign anything. The then 21-year-old could not sit still for long.

He began to cultivate a business relationship with Walmart, very differently from how his father and uncle were used to operating. Baker approached the potential deal with a service mentality. He asked how he could help, accepted the lease proposed by the supermarket chain instead of imposing his own company's, and ensured the property was handed over properly painted, not just in a makeshift condition.

His relationship-based approach opened the door to further deals with Walmart, which was just beginning to expand into the eastern US at the time. More than 40 deals were to follow.

On his own path

Anyone who hears Richard Baker talk about his first steps in the business world can sense that he wants to be a self-made man, despite his family background. This is particularly evident when Baker proudly recounts how he deviates from the usual practices of the real estate world and values different ways of thinking.

Given the family empire and his own success with Walmart, others might have been content with their role. Not Richard Baker, who began to venture into retail in the early 2000s.

He and his wife Lisa lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, home to many hedge funds and private equity firms. They were friends with some of the owners through their children's friends and often met for dinner. After these meetings, his wife would ask him why others owned hedge funds while Baker was building strip malls.

“Every successful person needs a partner that kicks him in the tush every now and then,” Baker joked in the conversation with Walker three years ago. In the early 2000s, he began working with a team on the multi-billion dollar acquisition of the toy chain Toys’R’Us. When he told his father about it, he was not impressed. “We develop shopping centres, what are we doing with Toys’R’Us?” asked Baker Senior.

His wife advised him to do the deal with one of her private equity acquaintances. Baker Senior then changed his mind and connected his son with friends – Bill Mack and Lee Neibert of Apollo Real Estate Advisors. Together they founded NRDC Equity Partners, but they lost the bidding war for the toy chain.

Finally retail

Soon after, Richard Baker succeeded with Lord & Taylor. He paid Federated Department Stores 1.2 billion dollars for the historic US department store chain. Over 97 percent of the purchase price came from bank loans, with NRDC Equity Partners contributing the remaining 25 million dollars in equity.

Lenders were willing to provide such a high proportion of the purchase price because Baker viewed the retail company as two separate entities: one as an operator of department stores (opco) and the other as a real estate company (propco). Lord & Taylor had valuable properties with stores in prime locations like Fifth Avenue in New York. Baker believed their value was not reflected in the purchase price of the then-struggling department stores. The bank loans were secured against this value. The acquisition of Lord & Taylor became the blueprint for the numerous 'Opco Propco' deals that were to follow.

In 2008, the acquisition of Canada's oldest department store chain, Hudson’s Bay, followed. With the purchase of Saks in 2013, Baker positioned himself at the centre of the North American luxury retail market. Hudson's Bay expanded into Europe in 2015 with the acquisition of German department store chain Galeria Kaufhof, and some of the locations formerly owned by Dutch V&D were acquired a year later. The struggling luxury competitor Neiman Marcus was acquired in 2024. In the same year, despite the previously unsuccessful chapter with Kaufhof, Baker and NRDC invested in the successor company, the now-merged department store Galeria Karstadt Kaufhof.

Slow death

After initial successes at Lord & Taylor and Saks and ambitious expansion plans, Baker's tenure at the department stores was recently marked by significant challenges and much criticism. The bankruptcies attracted considerable media attention because thousands of jobs and the existence of household names of the department store world were at stake.

Critics complain that Baker focused heavily on monetising real estate assets instead of investing in the core retail business. For example, the Lord & Taylor flagship building on Fifth Avenue was sold to co-working space provider WeWork for 850 million dollars in 2017. The department store remained as a tenant with a store on a much-reduced ground floor space. The operating company of Lord & Taylor was eventually sold for 100 million dollars in 2019, before the chain filed for bankruptcy and was liquidated in 2020.

This pattern, described by some as “asset stripping,” resulted in valuable properties bringing in short-term cash. Meanwhile, the retail chains struggled with underinvestment and debt, often leading to bankruptcy.

The Hudson's Bay Company underwent a similar development under Baker's leadership. Although he initially managed to get the flagship stores back on track after years of declining sales, the 355-year-old company eventually filed for creditor protection in March 2025 and went into liquidation. All remaining locations were subsequently closed.

Analysts and former employees speak of a “slow death,” attributing it to poor leadership, outdated strategies and an inability to adapt to the modern realities of retail.

The company was described in the media as having been “plundered for its real estate,” as billions were generated from property sales while necessary renovations were delayed and suppliers went unpaid.

Implosion in luxury sector

It was often unclear where the money raised from real estate was invested. Even when the crisis at Hudson’s Bay had long set in by 2024 and Saks had been in arrears with suppliers since 2023 according to media reports, Baker initiated the 2.7 billion dollar acquisition of Neiman Marcus. He spun off his luxury retailers into Saks Global, a new company comprising Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman.

This merger, however, burdened the new group with over two billion dollars in debt. This affected its ability to pay suppliers and led to low stock levels. In January 2026, Saks Global filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and Baker stepped down as interim CEO after just two weeks.

What remains is a long list of creditors from the fashion sector. Saks owes around 700 million dollars to groups and brands such as Chanel, Mayhoola and Akris. The default of the largest US luxury retailer even threatens the existence of smaller labels, who risk being left with the costs of goods they have already ordered.

The latest chapter at Saks Global raises doubts about the extent to which Baker can lead the Düsseldorf-based department store group Galeria into a sustainable future. After Baker acquired one of the predecessor companies, Galeria Kaufhof, and its Belgian subsidiary for 2.8 billion euros in 2015, the department store chain became embroiled in the problems of its parent company, HBC. Instead of the initially promised investments, financial concessions were demanded from employees just two years later.

Finally, in 2018, the long-denied merger with Karstadt to form Galeria Kaufhof Karstadt took place. HBC soon withdrew from the combined group and sold its shares to René Benko's Signa. After several insolvencies and the collapse of Signa, Richard Baker re-entered Galeria as an investor with NRDC and Bernd Beetz. The merged department store group is said to have recently returned to operational profitability after difficult years.

Baker's legacy: brilliant maverick or cold-hearted real estate investor?

Does the repeating pattern of largely debt-financed takeovers, real estate monetisation and subsequent bankruptcy testify to systematic, cold-blooded plundering? Or was Baker, even with his real estate manoeuvres as a liberating blow, unable to save struggling department store chains whose business models were already under increasing pressure from the rise of e-commerce and store closures during the pandemic?

Given his family's wealth and early success with Walmart, it is hard to believe that Baker was driven solely by the pursuit of profit in his repeated takeovers of ailing department store chains. Rather, he seems to have enjoyed playing the host in his department stores and the fact that he could combine the worlds of real estate and hospitality in his own way.

Compared to the staid family business of dull strip malls, owning luxury department stores in particular brought prestige. The Christmas campaigns at Saks were a New York happening with opulent light shows and, in 2022, a performance by the popular musician Elton John.

In the past, Baker often stressed that he did not view the acquisitions as real estate deals, but also felt a duty to revitalise the department stores' business operations. There are also former colleagues who can attest to Baker's commitment. “He was fully engaged,” Evelyn Reynolds, who was responsible for business development and home furnishings during her nine years at Hudson’s Bay, told the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail.

Baker himself spoke out last week in an interview with The New York Times, where he insisted that he had kept loss-making department stores and jobs alive for longer than others could have. He added that he was now glad to be “out of the department store business”.

The real estate magnate once said about business in a conversation with financier Walker: “If you always hang around the basket and play, you'll make your shots.” After many shots, Baker's retail game seems to be slowly coming to an end with a controversial record. Only at Galeria is the final score yet to be determined.

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