How the Montreal brand Ssense caught the fashion world’s attention

Ssense is an immigrant Canadian success story. The clothing store based out of Montreal gained notoriety for its focus on online shopping and legendary sales on luxury brands. 

Since its founding in 2003, Ssense has built a loyal customer base worldwide, comprising both celebrities and the everyday stylish consumer. But the Canadian company just hit a major roadblock, having recently filed for bankruptcy protection.

Today on Commotion, culture critics Thomas Leblanc and Joyita Sengupta join Elamin Abdelmahmoud to talk about Ssense’s recent financial woes, and how the Montreal brand became a major player in the fashion industry.

We’ve included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

WATCH | Today’s episode on YouTube:

Elamin: Let’s get into the Montreal of it all, because this is a company that was founded by three brothers out of Montreal: Rami, Bassel and Firas Atallah. What do we know about them? 

Joyita: This is a super interesting immigrant Canadian success story. So these three brothers are Palestinian-born. They grew up in Syria. They moved to Montreal in their teens, when their father moved the family over here. Ssense essentially started with Rami Atallah. He’s the CEO of the company. He goes to school for computer science, and while he’s in college studying computers, he’s also reselling designer jeans. So he kind of gets into the world of e-commerce that way. Pretty much, one of his final school projects was the very, very baby version of Ssense. But they saw some real potential there, and he got his brothers involved. One is a finance and economics major. The other was in mechanical engineering. So none of them are from the fashion world, but they got a loan from their dad to start this company. 

I think their boldness and trailblazing sort of nature is also part of the secret behind what has made Ssense work so well, because what they lacked in connections in the fashion industry or their own sort of basis of knowledge there, was leaning on young, creative, in-the-know fashion outsiders to come into the company and take risks. They took chances on designers that were emerging, and they were bold with their editorial vision. They sell clothes, but then they also have an incredible editorial side of things where there’s a lot of great content. It’s almost like a fashion magazine, too.

Elamin: My introduction to Ssense was through the great writers that they’ve actually helped shepherd through that online magazine who just talk about culture in general. And I was like, “Oh, I guess they also sell clothes.” But I’m not a cool person. I think what’s important to point out, Thomas, is that Ssense is so focused on the internet that they only have one brick and mortar store, in Montreal…. Tell me about the impact that the brothers have had in the city.

Thomas: Let’s start with the store. The store is located in old Montreal, but it’s barely a store. It’s more of a temple of really expensive clothes. What you can do is order the clothes. They will get delivered there. You can try them on, and possibly buy them. Celebrities, if they stop in Montreal, will possibly go to the store, maybe post a story. So that’s always very exciting. But their head office — I think that’s what’s interesting — is located in the old textile district called Chabanel. It’s an area that was really thriving in the ’60s and ’70s, lots of factories. Eventually fashion designers were based there, but there was less activity. But this is where Ssense decided to put the headquarters. And then there is the distribution center that’s near the airport. We’ve heard all these stories — for example, when Rihanna was preparing the halftime show for the Super Bowl, her styling team was browsing the Ssense website looking for the right shoe that she would wear for the performance. To me, that was always kind of insane to imagine, that there was in the suburbs of Montreal this space with all this high fashion, this Prada, this Gucci, all of these products.

So yeah, they’ve created this culture. And they were really also working with brands. We’ve talked a lot about the emerging brands, but also brands like Rick Owens, Saint Laurent, like more established European brands that have really given credibility to their own brand. They started early on working with a women’s wear buyer that had her own shop in old Montreal. I remember going there in my early 20s, and she became the buyer at Ssense. And I remember a few months ago, I saw that she’d made a move to a different retailer online. That was a question mark for me. I was like, “Oh, she’s leaving, what’s going on?” And what we’re gathering — because they’re extremely secretive. So in Montreal, we don’t know a lot about the brothers. If you’re following media, you’re mostly gonna get information through a trade publication like The Business of Fashion, which has really been doing reporting around this. But Quebec media or Canadian media barely covers Ssense, even though it’s a huge success story.

You can listen to the full discussion from today’s show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Jane van Koeverden.