In the spring of 2018, luxury e-retailer SSENSE opened a brick-and-mortar flagship store in the historic neighborhood of Old Montreal. Juxtaposing the building’s imposing neo-Gothic stone facade, British architect David Chipperfield 一 whose projects include BBC’s Scotland office, Issey Miyake’s London store, and museums, galleries, and several cemeteries 一 outfitted the interior in gray concrete and steel, a luxuriously gloomy physical manifestation of SSENSE’s dystopian-chic brand aesthetic. The not-quite-appointment-only but appointment-encouraged store also hosted site-specific exhibitions by figures like hypebeast dadaist Virgil Abloh and experimental electronic musician Arca. In the bowels of the building, a Vertical Lift Module (VLM) was installed. An automated storage machine typically used in factories and shipping companies like DHL, it was designed to organize mass quantities of merchandise throughout the five-story building so that up to 50 products (or unlimited amounts for celebrities) could be ordered online, shipped from the company’s warehouse, and tried on (by appointment) within 24 hours.
Behind the scenes, store employees cramped up against the machine in tiny, overheated staff rooms, preparing each garment to pristine crispness within this tight time span. Meanwhile, at the company’s headquarters in Montreal’s Garment District, an assembly of photographers, copywriters, editors, stylists, makeup artists, models, warehouse workers (a small warehouse at their main offices supplements a huge one located in the suburbs), managers, assistants, and coordinators was responsible for the 3,000–4,000 items uploaded to SSENSE’s e-commerce site weekly, totaling about 100,000 unique product types. The combination of high productivity and low wages formed SSENSE’s apparent burn-and-turn business strategy, which led some staff to nickname the company “Luxury Amazon.” They nicknamed the Montreal flagship store “High Fashion Prison,” in a reference to its brutalist design — and the company’s brutal management.
With its mix of heritage houses, up-and-coming independent designers, and streetwear donned by models staring with dead-eyed uniformity, SSENSE developed a reputation as a super cool innovator that changed the global landscape of luxury e-commerce, boosting its reputation with gestures toward social awareness and the pretense of intellectual cachet. Its editorial platform was directed by Joerg Koch (founder and editor in chief of the similarly au courant Berlin fashion mag 032c) and was formerly edited by members of the it-girl intelligentsia Durga Chew-Bose and Romany Williams. Under their direction, high-minded literati-penned articles made SSENSE’s virtual magazine an influential destination for smart fashion writing and upheld SSENSE’s commercial facade as cultured, critical, and chic. As the company expanded, the editorial tone shifted and was replaced by meme-y, hype-mongering advertorials directed toward the retailer’s young clientele. Still, the company successfully positioned itself as progressive in both its curation of avant-garde fashion and in its business ethics. The company’s roster of models was relatively diverse, and SSENSE issued Black Lives Matter solidarity statements and a “working document,” now buried in its editorial archive, stating the company’s “commitment to ending interlocking systems of oppression and exploitation.”
But as one of my sources noted, “What was happening in the workplace was in complete opposition to what was being promoted on the website.” Over the years, the company became well known for its SSENSE sale, during which products are marked down extravagantly, as determined by an algorithm that sometimes violates the markdown terms of their contracts with independent designers, according to an investigation by Blackbird Spyplane, an independent fashion newsletter. The once-seasonal sale eventually seemed to run for most of the year. Then, last August, SSENSE filed a bankruptcy protection claim, citing Donald Trump’s tariffs as a contributing factor. They owed over C$200 million — debt that had been accruing well before Trump assumed office. In fact, sales “deteriorated” between 2023 and 2025, according to Ernst & Young, the company appointed to audit SSENSE and oversee its bankruptcy. The news came as a shock to some in the international fashion community, but not to many inside the building.
SSENSE was founded in 2003 by Rami, Firas, and Bassel Atallah, brothers and immigrants from Syria, who moved to Montreal, Canada, in the mid-1990s, when Rami, the future CEO, was 15. Rami coded SSENSE’s website as his business school graduate thesis project, and puff pieces in the New York Times, Vogue, and the Business of Fashion characterized him as a savvy dreamer with a premonition for the future of style in cyberspace. As Atallah told the Times, “This is a story about immigrants with zero experience or knowledge about fashion, having to learn everything from scratch,” mythmaking that is oft repeated to its workforce in company-wide internal messaging. The company grew steadily, strategizing to establish itself as source material for fashion inspiration. In 2018, it bought Polyvore, a fashion mood board platform that was once worth C$200 million, and shut it down, redirecting users to SSENSE’s homepage when they logged in.
The global pandemic meant big business for SSENSE, which grew exponentially as online consumerism amped up while the world was under house arrest. E-commerce reached a historic peak, and SSENSE took advantage of the moment to ramp up production. Before Covid, SSENSE had about four or five photography sets in its studio. During the pandemic, this grew to roughly 10 times as many.
In 2021, the company received a minority investment by venture capitalist firm Sequoia Capital and was reportedly valued at C$5 billion. The same year, Rami and his wife broke the record for purchasing the most expensive home in Quebec when they moved into an C$18 million mansion in Montreal’s Westmount neighborhood, which, in a pathetic fallacy of class divide, sits atop a mountain behind an iron fence, overlooking the city.
Then, at least according to the official narrative, everything went downhill during the post-pandemic recession. Consumer habits changed. In 2022, C-level executives began jumping ship, including SSENSE’s head of marketing — a friend of the Atallahs who purportedly lived at the Ritz-Carlton while spearheading the company’s growth. In January 2023, SSENSE laid off 138 employees, approximately 7 percent of its workforce, which, at the time, totaled over 2,000, according to estimates by my sources. Another major round of cuts was enacted in fall 2024, and in May 2025, SSENSE eliminated another 8 percent of its workforce, about 140 employees.
As of September 2025, SSENSE had 1,161 employees across all its operations, according to Ernst & Young. These numbers, however, are misleading, as they only include salaried employees. SSENSE has always relied largely on freelancers. Freelancers can’t be laid off, and instead, they found that bookings stopped without warning.
SSENSE’s apparent burn-and-turn business strategy, which led some staff to nickname the company “Luxury Amazon.”
SSENSE’s labor problems went back at least to the pandemic, when it received a massive infusion of money and tried to grow too fast — largely at the expense of its workers. In the years that I lived in Montreal, SSENSE’s exploitative labor practices were an open secret (I freelanced as a copywriter at SSENSE for about a month in 2022). According to 15 current and former employees who worked across SSENSE’s corporate office, studio, warehouse, and retail store — most of whom would only speak to me on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of professional repercussions — the company created a culture in which discrimination, low pay, unsafe working conditions, and abuses of power were allowed to flourish. It did this by leveraging its profile in the fashion world, offering prestige in lieu of adequate pay, and by hiring people who were either inexperienced or were English-only speakers who had few other job options in francophone Montreal. Because of Quebecois separatism, the province enforces stringent language laws, mandating that most workplaces operate primarily in French. SSENSE was granted a rare exemption, likely because of the size of the company and the tax revenue it brought Quebec, making it one of the few Montreal corporations allowed to operate in English (along with Aylo, the parent company of Pornhub). During the pandemic, when Montreal went under strict lockdown, with a curfew in place, and most nonessential businesses were required to close, the luxury retailer’s head offices, studio, and warehouse remained open. (An SSENSE spokesperson told me that the company operated in compliance with provincial guidelines.)
Because of its practice of hiring young and inexperienced workers, almost everyone I spoke to described the company culture as “infantile” and like “high school” or Mean Girls and pointed out patterns of managerial incompetence, nepotism, and favoritism. Two of my sources referred to it as a “farce” and “sham” of a company.
SSENSE’s labor practices were especially hypocritical, said Patricia (names throughout this story have been changed to protect current and former employees), who was a stylist for SSENSE’s e-commerce platform, because “the CEOs would always have these speeches about how they care about their people.” The company could get away with offering low wages and encouraging workers to feel expendable, she believed, because “SSENSE had this facade of clout. Everyone would be like ‘Oh my god, you work at SSENSE? So cool!’ And I’d be like, ‘If you only knew.’”
Shortly after the Montreal storefront opened, a team of “hosts” (a now defunct role) began organizing a union. They invited a few other staff members to a meeting, handed out sign-up cards, and told them to keep things on the down-low. A source who was at this meeting told me that the day before staff members’ probation period ended, all the hosts were fired within a time span of 30 minutes. The only explanation they were given was that the department was being abolished. According to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (the Canadian constitution, more or less), joining a union is a fundamental right, and firing workers for union activity is prohibited. The rapid end of the nascent union left workers at SSENSE vulnerable to what was to come.
Working at SSENSE’s IRL store meant arriving at a brick-and-mortar storefront so sparsely stocked that it looked more like a gallery than a shop. The majority of floorspace inside the five-story building was dedicated to this exhibition of carefully selected garments. But out of public view, a very different logic was at work. The store had an office for managers, a staff room for stylists, and, other than the top floor, which housed a bookstore/café, each retail floor had a back room, referred to as the VLM room. In the basement, inventory specialists would receive and handle orders from SSENSE’s warehouse and place them on the VLM. As the VLM dropped off bins of products in the back rooms of each floor, two merchandise coordinators would grab them and begin to prepare garments for appointments. The back rooms were dark, poorly ventilated, and hot, and according to one of my sources, smaller than her bathroom. The rooms got so jammed that coordinators expanded into the stylists’ staff room, and then the manager’s office. Staff inputting inventory moved to the stairway, which was a fire hazard. In a profile of Chipperfield that the company commissioned to promote the building, the architect remarked, “I was nearly apologizing [to staff], saying that I know how difficult it is to work in a space like this.”
Andrea was hired as a merchandise coordinator when the flagship store opened. She had been working in a kitchen and was excited for a new opportunity. But she soon learned at SSENSE, “all the thought was put into presentation for clients” at the expense of employees. Each shift, two coordinators worked in the small back room to prep clothes for client appointments. That included retrieving items from the VLM, scanning, unpacking, steaming, and hanging each item. Once an appointment was over, they’d have to repack everything and update the virtual database. With up to four appointments available for each 30-minute block a merch coordinator might have to handle up to 100 items in just half an hour.
Stacked on the VLM in the back room, bins of merchandise towered overhead. Safety regulations prohibit bins from being stacked more than four high on the VLM, “but oftentimes, they would go up to six,” Andrea said. “We would change it when someone would come to inspect.” Items multiplied during sale seasons. Coordinators would have to pull bins full of clothes and accessories from overstacked towers, as if playing Jenga. Bins “could be quite heavy,” recalled Emily, another coordinator. “There was no training on how to lift a bin. No equipment to help you.”
Andrea’s back was constantly sore as a result. She took pain pills and wore a back brace to work, and she would cry in “pain and deep utter sadness” after each shift. The back room would get even hotter when employees steamed garments. In the summer months, staff showed up in shorts and tank tops to work the back room, but they were told they couldn’t dress that casually since they would sometimes be asked to cover one of the five floors, each of which had to be supervised at all times, even if there were no customers. “Sometimes, there was nobody available to cover you, and you weren’t allowed to pee,” said Emily. Staff were not allowed to have open beverages or food in the back room, and despite the heat, there was no sunlight. Emily said, “Being there almost seven days a week and having no sunlight really gets to you. My health was not good.” This was brought up to management, who installed a single SAD lamp to mimic sunshine. On one occasion, Andrea took a seat between appointments. Her manager saw and chastised her, then got rid of the chairs in each staff room. The manager herself would work perched cross-legged atop a mini fridge. Despite these inhumane conditions, the glamor of the company and the attitude of its managers made Andrea feel like she should be grateful to work there. And the smoky gray and mirrored interiors of the SSENSE store mystified exploitation. “I didn’t even realize I was worthy of being concerned about,” Andrea said in retrospect, “because, oh, I’m steaming a Gucci shirt.”
A culture of competition made matters worse. Sales associates, called “stylists,” were given the sales goal of C$1.5 million per week, according to Emily, and told that their jobs would be in question if they failed. When clients missed appointments, stylists often wanted to reschedule them and hold on to their bins of products in hopes of making the sale. Coordinators, however, did not have room to store any extra bins of products. That created hostility between stylists, who wanted coordinators to reschedule missed appointments and keep items on hand as long as possible, and coordinators, who needed to remove the tower of bins as quickly as possible in the already overflowing, overcrowded rooms, for their health and safety. Seeing “people crying, having panic attacks, that was pretty normal,” Emily said. “It was not unusual for you to be screamed at.” Andrea remembered stylists yelling at her and calling her stupid.
It’s nowhere in the information SSENSE gave Ernst & Young, but according to sources who worked in the studio — where the production of shooting and uploading products for the website took place — about 70 percent of the studio, a major part of the workforce that included hair stylists, makeup artists, photographers, stylists, models, set coordinators, and assistants, were classed as “independent contractors,” meaning the company did not owe them anything in the way of benefits, severance, or even regular scheduling (true too for the copywriters and editors, who were also largely freelance). Even so, freelancers had to provide their availability a month in advance, and SSENSE would send out daily production schedules at 4:30 p.m. the afternoon before each shift (or sometimes later). For freelancers with other clients, SSENSE’s schedule made it difficult to make appointments with them. “Often, you would keep a whole week open,” said Max Lester, a set coordinator, whose role was to oversee and keep track of the handling, shooting, and uploading of each item or garment on a set in a given day (Max, a friend of mine, chose to use his real name in this story). “I would be waiting every day, hoping I’d be booked tomorrow, or I might not be able to pay rent this month.”
I spoke to five freelance set coordinators, including Lester, and almost all were paid a day rate of C$150, which is below a living wage in Montreal, according to Richard, a former photographer and set coordinator. Richard, the only cis man I spoke to who worked as a set coordinator, made C$275 a day.
“Sometimes, there was nobody available to cover you, and you weren’t allowed to pee.”
Like Andrea, Robert was also working in a kitchen in October 2020, when the winter Covid wave hit. With his workplace closing, he took a job at the SSENSE warehouse, which, at the time, was always hiring. The warehouse was out by the airport, surrounded by vast fields of telephone poles and low-flying planes. He would sometimes work 12-hour shifts stacking boxes onto a forklift, and days passed where he saw no sunlight. The warehouse was dark, dusty, and dry, and like a fever, it ran “very hot, or very cold.” Light leaked through a single window near the ceiling at the far end of the warehouse, but Robert was stationed at the end of a conveyor belt, far from that window. Workers had to clock out to go to the bathroom. There were complimentary Nutri-Grain bars in the cafeteria, which some tried to take home, but bags were checked at the end of shifts, and the bars were confiscated.
Robert’s mental health declined. His first week, he worked from Wednesday to Friday. When payday came, he received C$27. Hours were missing on his paycheck, with Wednesday unrecorded altogether. According to Robert, “You had to be vigilant,” and people would regularly raise complaints about being underpaid. Sam, who also worked at the warehouse, said he worked 90 hours, including overtime, his first pay period, but his first paycheck was for just C$56, interrupting his ability to pay rent. He was also told he would earn C$15.50/hour, but when he got his paycheck, he discovered he was earning a dollar less per hour. A coworker warned him to always double-check pay stubs.
After quitting and going on unemployment, Robert took a job at the SSENSE warehouse again the following winter, this time collecting trash. “It’s so hard as an Anglo to find stable work there,” he said of Montreal. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, I need to keep this going.’” When he was eventually fired in one of the rounds of mass layoffs, his income was below the threshold to qualify for employment insurance.
Annie applied for a job as a photographer multiple times before being offered a more junior position at SSENSE, which apparently had just been created. She said her supervisor framed it as “a really exciting new role,” but the job description appeared to be the same as a regular photographer. The only difference was the salary, which was C$38,500 annually, less than what she was already making as a freelance set coordinator, a low-ranking role in the studio. This rate was opposed to the C$45,000 that some of her colleagues were making (though rates varied, and SSENSE instilled a culture of opacity around money; Annie was reprimanded by a manager for asking her colleagues their salaries while she was negotiating her own offer). At other e-commerce companies in Montreal, photographers were making double that.
While Annie had a degree in photography, was freelancing as a photographer at another e-commerce company, and was working as a set coordinator at SSENSE before accepting the role, other photographers at SSENSE said that experience wasn’t necessary to work as a photographer there. On the contrary, they said, experience often worked against applicants, as it meant they’d be less likely to tolerate SSENSE’s rates and terms. The company frequently hired “people with zero experience,” said Richard. “It was their first job ever, so of course, they’re not going to advocate for themselves. They didn’t know what to expect.”
Downgrading roles to justify underpaying employees appeared to be a pattern across the company. Patricia started as a stylist at C$300/day in 2019 and worked at SSENSE for five years. By the end of her time there, stylists were being paid C$180/day, and Andrea said that “junior stylists” were paid C$125/day, a role that was being offered with increasing regularity. According to Patricia, SSENSE told its staff that their pay was within the average industry range, but industry rates for e-commerce in Canada range from C$500 to C$1,000/day. Sandy, a makeup artist who freelances in Canada and internationally, said that industry rates for makeup artists in Canada vary from C$600 to C$1,000/day, and while Quebec’s rates for makeup artists are lower than the rest of the country’s, they still start at C$500/day. At the beginning of 2025, all freelancers were given new contracts, and many saw their rates slashed. Photographers and makeup artists who were used to making around C$300–C$500/day received new contracts for C$240/day.
“I knew it early on: This company’s gonna go downhill quickly.”
Within the freelance system, payroll errors occurred frequently. Sandy said freelancers who worked with agencies would sometimes wait months for pay. Lester, who was living paycheck to paycheck, would see his emails about late payments pinball between departments. After writing to a manager about a payment that had been delayed for over a month, he received a Slack message that same day — along with all other freelance set coordinators — announcing that payday had been pushed back a week. The workers would have to wait. “Trying to argue anything at SSENSE was like running up against a brick wall,” he said. In an email responding to my request for comment, a spokesperson for SSENSE told me that workplace standards, compensation practices, and employee well-being are a top priority, and that SSENSE cannot comment on individual personnel situations.
As the company expanded during Covid — launching new departments for kidswear and “Everything Else” (homewear, technology, beauty, and self-care products) — SSENSE’s photo shoots ramped up dramatically. Photographers went from shooting 30–40 items per day to 120–200, leading to a sense of recklessness that bordered on dangerous. Annie, the photographer who had worked as a set coordinator, recalled photographing a child of about six who had tears in her eyes. Annie said that the child did not want to be there, but her parents pressured her to keep working. She knew she couldn’t use the photos, but she also knew that if she stopped, “the child is going to get in trouble with their parents and agency.” Another child had a concussion, which could have been exacerbated by the strobe lights on set, but his mother insisted the shoot continue. “There were many of us on the set,” Annie said, “and none of us knew what to do.” Two sources mentioned a hairdresser who regularly showed up on closed lingerie shoots, hugged models, and sneaked peeks at them while they changed.
Lester described a ready-to-wear menswear shoot in which the model, a teenager who was fasting for Ramadan, fainted on set. There was a “very long list” of garments to shoot, and everyone was pressuring him to change faster, which Lester said was quite common. “Everyone was always rushing on set because we were underpaid, we were given too much to shoot, and we were just trying to get through it.” The model said he didn’t want to call off the shoot, which Lester thought was because models could get in trouble with their agents for losing bookings. Lester recalled that “the company refused to handle it in a way that would ensure that if he stopped today, he would be hired again.” Lester contacted supervisors and producers for guidance. “I was given very clear instructions that the set had to continue,” he said.
Lester and Annie were reluctant to push back too strongly in these kinds of situations because freelancers who did so were often branded as having a “bad attitude” and blacklisted or given less work. Lester’s team lead complained about some contractors to him, describing them as having a pattern of behavioral issues. “She pointed at one assistant and said something along the lines of, ‘I hate her attitude. I can’t deal with her. Unless I have nobody else to book, I’m not booking her anymore.’” He was afraid to complain out of concern that it might cost him jobs. “When people are desperate for work, they will tolerate abuse,” he told me.
Two sources mentioned a hairdresser who regularly showed up on closed lingerie shoots, hugged models.
The “bad attitude” characterization was especially dangerous to those advocating for racial justice in the workplace. At the height of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, and in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, a few SSENSE employees formed the Anti-Oppression Guild as an internal watchdog to guard against discriminatory practices. Many issues arose around SSENSE’s approach to working with Black models. During castings, models were asked if they could get their hair braided before shoots, which is time-consuming and expensive, without being offered additional compensation, even though there were hairstylists on set, and white models were not required to do their hair beforehand. One model was instructed to braid her hair a specific way. According to my source who worked on set with this model, “Every time she worked for SSENSE, she would go to her sister to get her hair braided. She would stay up all night just to get her hair braided for her shoot the next day.” Another model woke up four hours before his call time each morning to do his hair. For another shoot, a stylist took out a model’s braids, damaging her hair. When the images were posted, they were met with outrage online. Automated systems provided incorrect foundation shades for Black models, errors that makeup artists could not correct despite regularly flagging the mix-ups. Sandy recalled how the incorrect tones made Black models look “ashy” and “grayish.” Photographs of models in makeup that did not match their skin were uploaded online.
The Anti-Oppression Guild made a presentation to the company outlining these issues. It included a list of suggested beauty products and recommended that SSENSE hire a professional hair and makeup advisor experienced in styling people of color. Those suggestions were never implemented, and members of the guild were branded as “confrontational and dangerous, so watch out,” as one former guild member reflected. When a guild member advocated that a trainee be paid a fair day rate after she stepped up to style a model’s do-rag, the guild member was subsequently fired. The stated reason was that she had shared her employee discount — a common practice. HR told the guild member they could either pay the company C$1,200 to recoup so-called losses from the shared discount or sign an NDA. The guild member signed the NDA.
According to the Ernst & Young report, SSENSE cut C$36 million in the 2025 fiscal year through “restructuring and headcount reductions” — doublespeak for combining roles and laying people off. There were no promotions that year, and salaries were frozen. But in the grand scheme of the company, this wasn’t exceptional. Raises, if offered, were often of only 1 percent. Lester only received a C$10/day raise after two years of working at SSENSE. Patricia never got a promotion in five. A photographer who has been there for four years only received one promotion, after his first year. He’s survived three rounds of mass layoffs. For the fifth time, he applied for a senior photographer position. He was told, “You have a long way to go in your current role.” The person they hired instead didn’t know how to connect a camera to a computer. He had to train her.
“I knew it early on: This company’s gonna go downhill quickly,” Richard told me, “because they’re putting their eggs in the wrong basket. Instead of investing in the people they had, because they had really good employees, they were invested in people looking for the bottom line.” In early January, at the end of the interim bankruptcy period, SSENSE’s founding family won a bid to retain ownership, and they officially won back the company in February.
Many of the debtors to whom SSENSE still owes C$200 million are the independent designers who helped the company make a name for itself. Rashelle, an Indigenous textile artist in Calgary, is waiting on C$20,000 that she does not expect to see. Now that the Atallah brothers have retained official ownership, the bankruptcy process will continue, and SSENSE may not have to pay back vendors at all and will get to hold their products since vendors are legally at the bottom of the debtor’s priority list. SSENSE plans to “reduce IT expenses by C$3.9 million” this year and to cut costs through “the termination of certain contracts.” It’s already laid off maintenance staff at its headquarters.
Sources still at SSENSE tell me the bathrooms have no soap. Garbage is piling up. The milk in the fridge has soured. Those who still work there tell me they feel jaded, depressed, and scared about whether they will still have a job and what they will do to find work if they don’t. Many have quit. “People were hoping for drastic change,” said one source, “and now feel it’s gonna be the same: another year with frozen salaries and more perks disappearing.” In a company-wide memo, after the news that the founding family would retain ownership, Atallah thanked staff “for your resilience, your professionalism, and your belief in what we are building.” On the website, it’s business as usual. As I write this, the homepage features a profile of a Sotheby’s auctioneer called “HOW TO CHARM A ROOM FULL OF BILLIONAIRES” and a style guide called “WHAT THE SSENSE STAFF IS BUYING THIS SUMMER.” A marketing manager covets a Rick Owens cape, writing that he might look like a hero in it, or a villain. The head of creative has her eye on a silver cup set. I click, but the link is dead.
Chelsea Rozansky is a writer, critic, and interdisciplinary artist living in London.
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