Luxury department store Neiman Marcus said Thursday it is cutting 500 jobs—roughly 3 percent of its 16,000-member workforce—in efforts to reduce costs and help pay for new stores and acquisitions.
According to the Dallas Morning News, these cuts will affect approximately 157 of employees in the company’s Dallas headquarters, which currently employs about 4,800 workers.
All job cuts were made in corporate and support positions, as well as in distribution facilities. No store sales associates were laid off.
“We have undertaken an initiative called Organizing for Growth, the goal of which is to improve the ways we run our business and to accelerate investments in the customer-facing initiatives that drive future growth,” Neiman Marcus CEO Karen Katz told the Dallas Morning News, adding that the restructuring process has been in the works for several months.
Several employees reported surprise at the timing of the layoffs. One told the Morning News people were reassigned with pay cuts and that the layoffs were made to both longtime and new employees. The cuts even included workers who recently won top in-house awards.
“Even as we adjust our course, our mission is unchanged,” Katz said. “Every employee of Neiman Marcus Group has a single focus: our customer. We remain dedicated to serving them by offering the most incredible luxury and fashion merchandise in the world’s most beautiful stores and dynamic websites.”
In August, Neiman Marcus filed a registration statement for a proposed initial public offering (IPO) of its common stock. The money raised from the IPO could help the company pay off its debt of about $4.5 billion, which was reported in the retailer’s recent fourth quarter report for fiscal year 2015.
A net loss of $32.9 million was also reported, however, the company reached more than $5 billion in revenue.
Neiman Marcus currently operates 41 namesake locations, 42 Last Call clearance centers and New York’s Bergdorf Goodman. A new store under construction in Long Island’s Roosevelt Field Mall is slated to open in February 2016, with another location at Hudson Yards in Manhattan opening in 2018.
Neiman Marcus isn’t the only retailer laying off workers this year in hopes of cutting costs, Walmart announced this week it will lay off as many as 500 employees, Bebe axed 50 and Target cut 3,100 jobs back in March and 140 more corporate positions in June.