SSENSE believes that being a brand today is about facilitating culture and pushing conversations forward, so for our 20th anniversary, we thought about ways to celebrate our brand without looking backward by using the milestone as an occasion to imagine what’s next for luxury and ecommerce over the next 20 years.

We used this moment in time as a springboard for creative endeavors that stretch far beyond communicating a product. We believe that the future of commerce is media and vice versa, so the concept of SSENSE XX was to test future innovations in how these two web experiences can combine.

Founded by a former engineering student, Rami Atallah in 2003, the SSENSE business approach is inherently quantitative and forward-thinking, more so looking ahead in an industry where qualitative attributes like heritage is sometimes overvalued. So how do you celebrate an anti-nostalgia anniversary? By seeding the next 20 years rather than looking backward.

In the fashion space, so many incredible stories get left on the proverbial cutting room floor. Working with designers who we’ve been partnering with, often for over a decade, we were able to collaborate for this project not only on a product level but on a cultural one. And these are the kinds of experiences our customers want. Imagine buying an original Rick Owens flag while watching him on a Zoom call with his favorite performance artist? Or tuning into a Lu’u Dan cooking show where the collaborative chef’s knife is immediately for sale? Would you check out a Marine Serre chess board while also watching a speed chess game?

The SSENSE community sees us as an information hub that’s entrenched in what’s happening in culture today. For nearly ten years, we’ve dedicated a considerable amount of marketing bandwidth toward being a place where customers can read about design and the culture behind it — not just buy it. So if our audience comes to us for coverage of fashion week as much as to buy a new jacket, then SSENSE XX is a space where those two parallel experiences of culture and commerce combine.

In an industry where heritage is often celebrated and overvalued, for our 20th anniversary, rather than looking back, we looked forward: working with 20 creatives who have played an influential role in the history of SSENSE.

In addition to commissioning a capsule of 20 products from renowned designers for the project, we worked with each designer to commission a cultural activation that would go live alongside the product launch — be it a video, a dinner, an interview, or even a cooking show.

These products were dropped on a specially designed microsite in which customers could toggle between the product drops and the content associated with each drop — creating a shopping experience in which media and purchasing combine. We believe that the future of commerce is media and vice versa, so the concept of the microsite was to test how customers and our community would navigate these worlds together.

The core idea was simple: work with 20 designers who define the future of fashion to release a series of 20 limited edition products, and to launch these products in a way that creates an experience where media and purchasing combine. In short, alluding to what shopping can look like 20 years in the future.

At the center of SSENSE XX was a microsite where our audience could toggle between the capsule drops and content projects associated with each of the limited objects.

This was an experiment of offline as much as online luxury. Our flagship store in Montreal, which coincidentally is shaped like an iPhone, was transformed into a screen broadcasting the drops so visitors were essentially walking into a real life version of SSENSE XX.

For the past 20 years, SSENSE has garnered critical acclaim as both an e-commerce engine and a producer of cultural content, generating an average of 100 million monthly page views. Approximately 70% of our audience is of the coveted Gen Z and Millennial consumer segment between the ages of 18 to 40 who don't just come to SSENSE to shop for luxury, but to learn more about the people and ideas shaping the future of fashion.

Diving deeper into our analytics, web visitors who consume SSENSE content spend 10x more than those who haven't. This created a strategic imperative for SSENSE XX to springboard our customers into a cultural activation – not just a product – providing access to worlds, people and ideas they wouldn’t normally have access to, making our anniversary a multichannel celebration of design and futuristic thinking.

With the launch of SSENSE XX, each limited-edition drop lived on an interactive SSENSE XX microsite at xx.ssense.com and was rolled out between October 11 to November 7, revealing shoppable products alongside unique, co-created digital content pieces.

Each product was dropped daily over the course of 20 days, unlocking a new level of the capsule experience and bringing people back to the SSENSE XX ecosystem. Each collaboration was documented in a series of stills, and animated to video in the same view. Treated in the way a special archive would be indexed. The facade of our retail location in Montreal was activated for projected content in sync with each product drop, and featured both dormant and active modes depending on time of day.

The campaign appeared in global markets including the United States, Canada, South Korea, Japan, United Kingdom, China, Australia, and Hong Kong.

Over the span of 20 days, the microsite garnered 2.3 million page views with the campaign resulting in 413 million impressions across PR and social media. SSENSE XX and the capsule drops were featured in global media outlets including WWD, Highsnobiety, The Cut, Fashionsnap (JP), FASHION Magazine, Designscene (FR), and Complex, to overwhelmingly positive acclaim.

HIGHSNOBIETY

“SENSE XX is the cleverly concise title of the 20 exclusive collaborations that SSENSE has curated from the world’s most influential designers and longtime SSENSE partners.”

WWD

“With a party in Paris, upcoming product drops, collaborations and activations, SSENSE is celebrating its 20th anniversary in grand style, online and offline.”

Overall, the 20 drops achieved nearly 80% full price sell-through and drove close to one million in sales.