SaksWorks Turns Your Favorite Department Store Into a Coworking Space

SaksWorks strengthens that bond between life and brand. Even though my tour occurred before SaksWorks officially opened to its hundreds-strong waitlist, the Saks and Hudson’s Bay employees who guided me through were the largest group of strangers I’d met in well over a year. After ticking the boxes of our walk-through, the conversation fell instantly back into the familiar: celebrity gossip, beauty products, outfit recommendations. It’s surprising how quickly a group of women and men you just met can become confidantes. For people struggling to readjust to re-emergence, a co-working space offers a neat sanctuary of manageable social interaction—especially in the suburbs, where subway run-ins and sidewalk chit-chat aren’t as popular as in Manhattan.

Hudson’s Bay Company’s executive chairman and CEO Richard Baker sees this as SaksWorks’s ultimate offer. “Our initial vision and our continued vision for SaksWorks was to be able to create a place where there was community and where you can have healthy and high-quality relationships,” he tells me over a Zoom call broadcast in a SaksWorks conference room. “If we can someday have a network of a million members at SaksWorks, people could find community, friendship, a common purpose. Then I think we would have accomplished a tremendous amount.”

A retail store-turned-hangout lounge is, in its essence, what every department store has been trying to do since, well, forever. First they lured husbands with velvet setées, then cliques with posh restaurants serving thin greasy fries and tall slender cocktails, and then partiers with exclusive after-hours events. A place for likeminded aesthetes to continue to shop, think, collaborate, and relax is the logical next step—and the potential seems endless. The Saks of the future could be a one-stop shop for our blended live-work lifestyles.