“I wouldn’t put any money on [Ssense] being around over the next ten years as it is,” Jules (not his real name), a sales agent who works with fashion brands on the site, said when I spoke to him about the company in January. “I don’t think it’s sustainable right now.”

His prediction came as something of a surprise: for over a decade, the Canadian multi-brand e-tailer was a fashion mainstay, infamous for an ironic and meme-centric advertising tone used to court Gen Z consumers who spend their lives online. Whereas sites like Holt Renfrew and Net-a-Porter tend to place their models against Parisian streets and plush interiors, Ssense sold its designer wares with a sense of humour, prone to online phrases like “chill sesh” and “soft boy.”

If luxury retail traditionally concentrated on older consumers who have more disposable income, Ssense built its business courting the kids. According to their website, approximately 80 percent of their customers are between eighteen and forty. It’s a strategy that worked—in 2021, the company was valued at around $4.1 billion and gained minority investment from Sequoia Capital—until it didn’t.

At the end of August, it was revealed that Ssense was preparing to file for bankruptcy protection after a creditor moved to sell the company without its consent, triggering what the firm described as an “immediate liquidity crisis.” By September, the company was granted a reprieve—the Superior Court of Quebec ruled Ssense could maintain operations while it restructures. This provides some hope for the company—meaning they are able to consider investment opportunities to ensure the future of the site. “We now have the time, resources and structure in place to begin the process of rebuilding a stronger Ssense,” said chief executive officer and founder Rami Atallah in a statement.

While the impact of US president Donald Trump’s tariffs was a factor in Ssense’s struggles, people are also spending less. Ssense isn’t alone in feeling this change. The backdrop is a wider post-pandemic slowdown for luxury after the online shopping boom collapsed. It’s seen other retailers like London-based Matches folding. Sales in the fashion and leather goods division of luxury goods conglomerate LVMH fell 9 percent in the second quarter of 2025 and—according to Vogue Business—50 million consumers reduced their spending on luxury items last year.

Jules, it turned out, predicted correctly, but was off by about nine years. Four years on from that $4.1 billion valuation, how did the cool kid of e-commerce, once admired by its competitors for disrupting the category, fall so far?

Ssense was founded in Montreal by the Atallah brothers in 2003 as a family business. Rami, Firas, and Bassel Atallah grew up in Syria before moving to Canada when they were teenagers. They now serve as chief executive officer, chief financial officer, and chief operating officer respectively, but in the early days of Ssense, the trio—who were all in their early twenties at the time—were responsible for everything: they photographed the products for the site, and Firas sent orders from the post office. “This is a story about immigrants with zero experience or knowledge about fashion, having to learn everything from scratch,” Rami said in a rare interview with the New York Times.

After their parents mortgaged their house to invest in Ssense, the Atallahs first opened a physical store to gain a reputation in the industry, as Bassel told Elle Canada in 2017. The Ssense website launched in 2006, after the trio had graduated university. Rami studied computer engineering at Polytechnique Montréal, and building the nascent Ssense site was his graduate thesis. If a typical path into the fashion industry would be to study design or retail, it’s the “tech first, fashion second” approach that set Ssense apart. In that New York Times interview, Rami called the team “expert outsiders,” with writer Nathan Taylor Pemberton reporting that current and former staff members say the company “resembles a tech firm more than a purveyor of cool clothing, where each decision must be bolstered by numbers.”

The tech-first model, combined with the ability to spot up-and-coming brands before competitors did, shortly proved successful. According to one interview with Firas, by 2010, Ssense had 1 million visitors to the site per month. In 2016, the Globe and Mail declared they were “the Montreal company shaking up luxury fashion, one pair of $860 sweatpants at a time.” Atallah told the paper that Ssense had an 82 percent compound annual sales growth since it began, with 10 million monthly visitors expected by the end of the year. Two years........

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