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- 🎯 How SSENSE became a ‘cultural protagonist’
🎯 How SSENSE became a ‘cultural protagonist’
Transcend products. Participate in culture.
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How SSENSE became a ‘cultural protagonist’
Chess Move
The what: A TLDR explanation of the strategy
SSENSE started as a school project that evolved into a fashion-tech powerhouse valued at over $4 billion.
This achievement is especially remarkable considering:
Online fashion is hypercompetitive.
It’s notoriously difficult to scale to these software-like valuations.
Differentiation is crucial, even more so in luxury industries where value is “rooted in reflective emotional appeal.”
Founder Rami Atallah wanted to make more than a brand. He wanted to create a “cultural protagonist.”
To do so, he made sure SSENSE found ways to add value to customers in ways beyond the purely transactional.
Former Director of Brand Marketing Strategy Fanny Damiette described fashion as a 'pretext' for a bigger mission of using it "as a lens through which to understand the world."
As a counterpoint to common high-fashion stereotypes of exclusivity, SSENSE established an accessible yet aspirational gateway into the culture through:
Editorialised content: Offering distinct cultural perspectives with minimal marketing.
Visual exploration: Providing inspiration through an emphasis on expertly curated styling.
Experimental collaborations: Creating immersive and avant-garde memorable experiences that stand out from the traditional.
With global curation and delivery of over 700 brands across 150 countries, SSENSE's unconventional tactics created unique ways for the brand to connect with customers, differentiate itself within its competitive market, and garner mindshare to become a destination within the culture.
💡 | Strategy Playbook: Craft unique content that transcends products to become a cultural resource and destination. |
Breakdown
The how: The strategic playbook boiled down to 3x key takeaways
1. Have a cultural point of view
What immediately distinguishes SSENSE as an e-commerce platform is its magazine-like presentation.
From SSENSE homepage
SSENSE takes the idea that "every company is a media company" to the next level:
Content is prominently featured above the fold on their landing page
Professional writers, not marketers, craft the content
Products tend to be more in the background of the content
Why is this effective?
By prioritising stories and interviews over product-centric content, SSENSE builds credibility and an 'emotional connection' with its customers while also attracting new audiences.
As of 2018, "29 percent of revenue is generated via SSENSE's readers."
2. Provide a platform for exploration
SSENSE has a unique focus and approach to the styling of its products.
Rather than photos focused on singular products and their details, they are styled with other brands they carry, mixing streetwear and high-end luxury, established and emerging, to create unique outfits.
Through this, customers can see products in valuable new contexts:
It shows a product's versatility and how it might integrate with their current style choices or inspire trying something new.
Recognising curation as a strength, the platform was designed to deemphasise search to lean into visual exploration.
Even their mobile app was inspired by the iOS Photos app to create an easily navigable lookbook of style inspiration.
This approach turned SSENSE into not only a helpful tool for fashion enthusiasts but also a resource for industry research and social sharing that others often reference.
3. Expand surface area through experimental collaborations
In addition to its robust core platform, SSENSE makes it a point to step outside the box to experiment with retail activations and microsites.
This allows them to create immersive brand experiences while further cutting through the noise of a crowded market:
From SSENSE Humanrace
The launch of Pharrell Williams's skincare brand Humanrace featured five floors of physical retail activations at SSENSE's flagship store in Montreal, each offering a different look into the brand's creative vision.
A microsite highlighted these experiences with a look into sculptural designs, a curated clothing archive, and more, immersing new customers into the growing community and vision of "Humanrace Wellbeings."
The intention behind creating these standout experiments may forego immediate transactional benefits. It's a longer-term strategy of cultivating authenticity and building credibility, as Damiette said, "one stone at a time."
Rabbit Hole
The where: 3x high-signal resources to learn more
[27 minute watch]
Fanny Damiette breaks down the vision, growth, and culture of innovation that shaped the SSENSE brand. Highlights include:
• How "everything is looked at through the lens of innovation and how we can do better than the current status quo" across fashion, technology, and operations.
• Their philosophy on minimal use of Photoshop (e.g. not fixing ‘flaws’) is an authentic differentiator.
[13 minute read]
Over 250 individuals make up the technology team at SSENSE. The brand leverages content (once more) to draw top tech talent and advance practices within tech culture.
• “SSENSE champions independent critical thinking, which means our authors may express their personal opinions and share their own ideas.”
• Content topics range from "Designing With Ambiguity" to "How to Work from Home" as well as a breadth of more technical topics.
[11 minute read]
From the early days of selling designer jeans on eBay to balancing cultural intuition with a data-driven approach, the 3 founding brothers paved the way for the vision and evolutionary success of SSENSE.
• Atallah had a vision of aspirational accessibility where “if you didn’t have money, people should be able to walk away with something from SSENSE.”
• Their unique editorial content platform was spearheaded by Joerg Koch, editor of German contemporary culture magazine 032c, as the website's first editor-in-chief.
That’s all for today’s issue, folks!
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— Written by Carver Wilcox
— Edited by Tom Alder
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