Nordstrom

In May 2025, the Nordstrom family and the Mexican retail group El Puerto de Liverpool closed a transaction valued at approximately $6.25 billion that took Nordstrom Inc. private and ended its run as a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange. The Nordstrom family, led by CEO Erik Nordstrom and President Pete Nordstrom, retained a controlling 50.1% stake, with Liverpool holding 49.9%. The arrangement returned majority ownership to the founding family and removed Nordstrom from the quarterly-earnings cycle that has shaped department-store strategy through years of pressure on traffic, margins, and store fleets.

The company that became one of the defining names in American upscale retail started as a single downtown Seattle shoe store. John W. Nordstrom, a Swedish immigrant who had made his stake in the Klondike Gold Rush, opened Wallin & Nordstrom with partner Carl F. Wallin in 1901, and the business expanded from footwear into apparel, accessories, cosmetics, and the full department-store assortment across the twentieth century. The Nordstrom name became synonymous with a customer-service model that the retail industry studied for decades, anchored by a liberal returns policy and a commissioned sales floor that incentivized personal client relationships. That service identity remains the brand’s core differentiator against Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, and the broader department-store field.

Two-store formats carry the business. The full-line Nordstrom stores operate in the premium tier, occupying 140,000 to 300,000 square feet as anchor positions in high-quality regional and super-regional centers, while Nordstrom Rack, the off-price banner, operates a larger store count in a smaller 30,000-to-40,000-square-foot format that has become the company’s volume-and-traffic growth engine. The Rack model sells full-line overstock, closeout inventory, and dedicated off-price merchandise, and its expansion has outpaced full-line openings through the 2020s. The Nordstrom Local concept, a small-format service hub for pickups, returns, and alterations without dedicated inventory, complements both banners in select urban markets.

Nordstrom’s full-line store presence now concentrates in the United States, with the brand holding positions in some of the strongest American shopping centers and urban retail districts: Westfield Century City, Westfield Valley Fair, South Coast Plaza, Fashion Valley, and The Grove in California, Cherry Creek Mall in Denver, Ala Moana Center in Honolulu, Oakbrook Center near Chicago, Somerset Collection in Troy, The Mall at Short Hills, The Westchester in White Plains, Mall at Green Hills in Nashville, NorthPark Center and The Galleria in Texas, City Creek Center in Salt Lake City, Tysons Corner Center, and Bellevue Square near the company’s Seattle home. A landlord’s ability to secure a Nordstrom full-line store has long functioned as a marker of a center’s positioning, since the brand’s site selection screens for affluent catchment, co-tenancy quality, and demographic profile more selectively than mass-market department-store anchors. The Liverpool partnership could give Nordstrom a route to Mexican market knowledge, real estate relationships, and supply-chain scale that a private ownership structure can evaluate without public-market scrutiny, making the company’s anchor commitments more strategically durable for the centers that host them.