Atallah said one recent morning as he sat in a quiet nook of his retail store. “This is a story about immigrants with zero experience or knowledge about fashion, having to learn everything from scratch,” Mr. Even today, he’s loath to admit any degree of insider influence, preferring instead to refer to himself and his team as “expert outsiders.” It’s a mind-set he maintains, in part, by rarely hiring talent away from competitors. Its corporate headquarters are in Montreal’s sleepy garment district, far from the major fashion capitals of the world. Geographically speaking, it does in a sense. Ssense appears to operate in a world of its own design.

And as part of the collaboration, Burberry invited Ssense to add its neoteric polish to its SoHo retail space. This summer, Burberry collaborated with the retailer to introduce a capsule collection, codesigned by Peter Saville and Jo Ratcliffe.

Atallah’s desire to make his company a “cultural protagonist.” It has invested heavily in an editorial platform, overseen by Joerg Koch, the founder of the German fashion magazine 032c, which expanded into a twice-a-year print magazine in 2019.Ĭollaborations with brands large and small are frequent occurrences, as are lavishly produced cultural events, like the time a replica of Virgil Abloh’s Chicago studio was built inside of Ssense’s retail space, designed by the architect David Chipperfield, or when the experimental producer ARCA staged an elaborate performance, involving vats of fluid, on all five floors. It likes to juxtapose high fashion labels like Gucci and Prada, which joined in 2017, against street wear brands such as Noah and Jun Takahashi’s Undercover.Įven more, Ssense is the rare retailer perceived as a brand all on its own, a result of Mr. The platform offers over 70,000 items from more than 700 brands, the company said. Now, nearly two decades after the company was founded, Ssense has become a destination for Gen Z and millennial consumers of designer clothing and footwear. “It was really quite special when they came to me,” Ms. Ssense also supported the French designer Marine Serre from the earliest days, when she was still showing her collections in her Paris bedroom. He oversees 1,300 employees spread across North America and Europe, alongside his brothers, Firas, 41, the company’s chief governance officer, and Bassel, 37, its chief operations officer. Atallah, 39, a Palestinian-born immigrant who grew up in Damascus, prefers not to be the face of his company, he has quietly become one of the most influential figures in the fashion industry. “Modesty,” of course, is not typically a word that comes to mind when discussing the hype-heavy spheres of designer fashion and street wear, Ssense’s foremost offerings.Īnd although Mr. Ssense says it will bring in more than $750 million in revenue this year, though that number could not be independently verified, and, until now, has never taken on significant outside investment. The valuation figure is the closest thing resembling a boast about Ssense’s success to date, and it places it among the ranks of e-commerce conglomerates like YOOX Net-a-Porter Group and Farfetch, though both of those companies are publicly traded.

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