Department store beauty departments are traditionally located on ground floors, close to store entrances and have been for very many decades. And the Saks Manhattan beauty department has been at street level since 1924. But turning its back on tradition, Saks beauty will now sit in a revamped second floor home that will also go heavily into spa services and treatment rooms. The new beauty department will be 40% larger than its ground-floor predecessor and will feature an event space as well as 15 spa treatment rooms, including Blink Brow Bar, FaceGym and Skinney MedSpa that offers fat-freezing CoolSculpting treatments. There will also be beauty concierges on hand to advise customers without being linked to specific brands -which is an important and much needed new development in order to effectively market the 122 brands that will be available in the department (61 of them new to Saks).

Saks Manhattan ground floor will now be home to handbags and leathergoods, and fine jewellery will be shunted from the ground floor to the basement.