Saks Fifth Avenue 1920s-30s Micro Beaded Floral Purse. With original label "Made in Belgium Exclusively for Saks Fifth Avenue." 

Size: 9 X 7 X 1 in. 

#7393 . 

Saks Fifth Avenue (originally Saks & Company, colloquially Saks) is an American luxury brand associated with Saks, a luxury ecommerce platform, and SFA stores, a chain of high-end department stores in North America. Andrew Saks was born to a German Jewish family in Baltimore, Maryland. He worked as a peddler and paper boy before moving to Washington, D.C., where at the age of only 20 he established a men’s clothing store with his brother Isadore. A. Saks & Co. occupied a storefront in the Avenue House Hotel building at 517 7th Street NW, in what is still Washington’s downtown shopping district. Saks offered his goods at one price only, no bargaining, and offered refunds on merchandise returns, neither of which were the more common practice at that place and time. Saks expanded into Manhattan with its Herald Square store in 1902, and in 1923 Saks & Co. merged with Gimbel Brothers, Inc., which was owned by a cousin of Horace Saks, Bernard Gimbel, operating as a separate autonomous subsidiary. In 1924 the Saks Fifth Avenue Building at 611 Fifth Avenue, with a full-block avenue frontage south of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, facing what would become Rockefeller Center. It rapidly became their flagship store, and later their global headquarters, as the company expanded across the United States during the Depression and World War II. During the 1950s the shift from downtown shopping to suburban shopping malls gained momentum, and Saks Fifth Avenue’s first anchor department store in a mall was in 1954 at Sunrise Center, now The Galleria at Fort Lauderdale. The chain was acquired by Tennessee-based Proffitt’s, Inc. (renamed Saks, Inc.) in 1998, and Saks, Inc. was acquired by the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) in 2013. During the 2000s and 2010s the company experienced significant downturns due to the economic collapse and turmoil of the post 9/11 world. As of March 2021, Saks Fifth Avenue’s brick-and-mortar stores and e-commerce platform operate as separate companies, distinguished as SFA and Saks, respectively, with an exclusive partnership. Saks Off 5th, originally a clearance store for Saks Fifth Avenue that first opened in 1990, is now a large off-price retailer in its own right.