SSENSE is an e-commerce and brick-and-mortar luxury and streetwear retailer based in Montreal, Canada. It was founded in 2003 by three brothers: Rami, Bassel and Firas Atallah. The platform currently serves 114 countries and operates in French, English and Japanese. Rami originally built the SSENSE platform as part of his graduate thesis for his computer engineering degree, then enlisted his brothers to help turn his project into a business.
Timeline
2004 - SSENSE opened its first freestanding store in Montreal. 2006 - The ssense.com website was officially launched. 2010 - SSENSE relocated its retail space in the historic district of Old Montreal. 2012 - SSENSE launched the world's first shoppable music video “I Think She Ready” starring FKi 1st, Iggy Azalea, and Diplo. 2013 - The company relocated its headquarters and warehouse to its current 100,000 sq. ft. space in Montreal's Garment District to accommodate its growing team. 2015 - SSENSE appointed Joerg Koch - founder and editor-in-chief of the magazine 032c - as its first editor-in-chief. 2016 - The website launched in Japanese with all editorial content and product information available in Japanese as well as offering fulfilment in Japanese Yen. 2018 - SSENSE acquired the fashion community Polyvore and Immediately closed the platform without warning, giving users one month to back up some of their content and to opt out of data sharing.
Operations
SSENSE currently employs close to 600 staff, achieves approximately 32 million page views per month, and has had 82 percent compound annual sales growth since its first year. SSENSE makes the majority of its revenue from luxury brands such as Valentino, Balmain, Yves Saint Laurent, Givenchy, Comme des Garçons, and Vêtements but the platform is also said to be operating outside the confines of the traditional fashion sphere with unconventional buys, strong connections to art, music and creativity, and a sophisticated blurring of streetwear and high fashion. Almost 80 percent of SSENSE clientele are said to be millennials, aged between 18 and 34. SSENSE obtained the popular fashion site Polyvore on April 6, 2018, and immediately shut it down and redirected all of its users to the SSENSE site. They have obtained the personal information of every user previously signed up to Polyvore. Users of Polyvore are enraged and have started a petition on change.org to fight this.
