Christmas is the festival of giving and receiving gifts! Luxury retail giants are going overboard to lure shoppers with over-the-top gift guides and holiday catalogs. Since years, the much revered Neiman Marcus’s Christmas Book has been leading with one of the most extravagant list of X’mas gift ideas. However, this year, Saks Fifth Avenue has jumped in the arena with a daring catalog to woo Christmas shoppers in the US. The holiday retail row has escalated with each high-end department store trying to outdo the other by offering luxurious gift options.
While this year Neiman Marcus selections include His and Hers Vilebrequin Quadskis for $50,000 each and a Vanity Fair Academy Awards Experience for $425,000, Saks Fifth Avenue’s new holiday gift guide unfolds with the $60,000 Chanel watch and $90,000 chinchilla-and-cashmere blanket.
The 16-page gift catalog from Saks is printed on lush, thick paper akin to the luxury jewelry catalogs. A traditional catalog entitled An Enchanted Experience is a mix of expensive and less expensive items. The catalog is set to be handed out or mailed starting this week to customers of Saks’s personal-shopper service, called the Fifth Avenue Club. More-affordable gifts also will be presented to customers visiting the Fifth Avenue Club by personal shoppers using iPads. With a flagship based in New York City, Saks has also launched a beautiful new packaging at stores nationwide this holiday season.
With an intention to “dream big” for the holidays, Saks has upped the wow factor with decorating the first two stories of Saks’s Manhattan flagship with 71,000 computerized lights and a 30-foot-tall garland.
The Wall Street Journal also reports that on the first floor of Saks’s Fifth Avenue flagship store in New York City, among the decorations customers will notice are a new crystal-beaded, Art Deco-style curtain between the elevator banks and “fantasy” ice women in the upper center circle. Three sides of the store will be completely encased in magnolia with thousands of twinkling LED lights. Moreover, the six center windows facing Fifth Avenue will display animated scenes with fairy-tale characters like Rapunzel and Sleeping Beauty, depicted in the Art Deco style of artist and designer Erté. The store will host an unveiling ceremony on Nov. 24, to be live-streamed on Saks’s website and on Twitter.
