Neiman Marcus Data Hack Impacts 4.6M eCommerce Consumers

Neiman Marcus Group has said it notified around 4.6 million online users that their personal data could have been accessed in a data breach dating back to May 2020, Reuters reported.

For the millions of customers being notified about the incident, “approximately 3.1 million payment and virtual gift cards were affected, more than 85% of which are expired or invalid,” said the company in a statement released Thursday.

The high-end department store chain said the information might have included names, contact information and credit card numbers, according to the report. There were around 3.1 million payment and virtual gift cards affected, but over 85% of those were expired or invalid.

The company said per the report that it didn’t have evidence that online customer accounts for its Bergdorf Goodman and Horchow units had been affected by the breach. It added that it had notified law enforcement authorities of the hack.

Neiman Marcus emerged from bankruptcy in September 2020, and in August announced it is working on debuting a new brand for itself.

Read more: A Year After Exiting Bankruptcy, a More Focused Neiman Marcus Emerges

Neiman is working with a “Re-Introduce Yourself” campaign, which, according to Jared Blank, chief marketing officer at enterprise eCommerce platform VTEX, could be the right move as the company is “figuring out what’s core to our business, how we build that out and how we layer digital on top of it.”

Neiman Marcus is working on assessing what luxury means post-pandemic, according to Blank.

“Once COVID hit, there was basically nothing they could do but restructure,” Blank said. “But the good news is a lot of that debt got off their books, which allowed them to rethink their business.”

Neiman’s bankruptcy, filed in May 2020, put the blame on the pandemic for the pressure on the business.

Since September 2020, the company has cut back its in-person stores, focusing more on digital retail, which is a transition that began before the pandemic. But the pandemic’s forced shift to digital saw Neiman committing to invest $85 million into its supply chain, as well as purchasing Stylyze, a Merchandising-as-a-Service startup, for an undisclosed amount.