The idea began with a pair of jeans. Three brothers sold a limited-edition pair of Diesel jeans online, and the speed of the sale told them something they could not unlearn.
Rami, Firas and Bassel Atallah were born in Damascus, Syria, and came to Montreal with their family as teenagers. By Rami's own account, quoted in a Globe and Mail profile, they were immigrants with no experience of fashion who had to learn everything from scratch. That is not modesty. It is a description of the stakes: no insider contacts, no family in the trade, no safety net.
What almost nobody noticed at the time was how much the physical store taught them.
They opened in 2003 and began with a physical store in Montreal. The online shop came in 2006. Early work was done by hand: Rami photographed the products for the site, and Firas carried orders to the post office. A brand known for cool restraint began in a very unglamorous place.
What almost nobody noticed at the time was how much the physical store taught them. Customers told them what they wanted, and the brothers turned that into a buying instinct. SSENSE grew into a multi-brand retailer shipping to 114 countries, with a flagship in a 19th-century Montreal building designed by David Chipperfield's firm in 2018.
The fall-out came in pieces. That same year it bought the community site Polyvore and shut it down, wiping users' data, and later apologised. A cyberattack in 2022 exposed employee data. Sequoia's 2021 investment had put its value above US$4bn, by one account, but layoffs followed in 2023, affecting 138 people.
Then tariffs. In 2025 SSENSE sought creditor protection with about C$371m in debt and put itself up for sale. In early 2026 a court accepted a bid from the three brothers to keep ownership.
That last fact is the quietest one in the story. The company they had built from a single online sale was at risk of being taken from them, and they fought to hold it.
For a first-time founder, the point is that inexperience is not the same as weakness. The brothers started with nothing to protect, so they learned by doing every job, and they refused to hand the result over cheaply.