Summary
Once upon a time, there was a place you could go on the internet to buy all the strangest fruits that fashion’s best and brightest had to offer. Now, you’re more likely to hit it when you decide to become the billionth person in the world to own a pair of sambas. That place is SSENSE - the luxury e-commerce mega retailer based out of Montreal, which houses every fashion brand from Canada Goose to Issey Miyake, and employs just about the entire 20-something anglo population of Montreal. SSENSE has become an undeniable powerhouse in the world of luxury e-commerce, carving a name for itself with an unorthodox business model that fuses fashion and technology. But can a company which has been called “the Amazon of high fashion” really be the bastion of the arts that it proclaims to be? In this extra special Patreon bonus episode, Maia and Hannah, with the help of a series of interviews from former SSENSE employees and small business owners, discuss SSENSE’S impact on fashion as an art form. As SSENSE gobbles up all the fish in the e-commerce pond, is it actually supporting emerging artists, or snuffing them out?
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| 0:00.0 | so much of having a brand is the branding and is the like selling a story and selling like why |
| 0:08.1 | you should buy this piece which you know if you're a smaller designer like might be more expensive |
| 0:13.2 | than like something else maybe of a similar style or whatever or like can't really be on sale |
| 0:20.6 | versus like something that could be |
| 0:22.1 | cut in half. And it's like part of it is selling the story. And if you're constantly then |
| 0:29.1 | having that sort of have to be put through the filter of then how this retailer wants their |
| 0:35.1 | brand to be, then like some of that's going to get lost on the way. |
| 0:39.0 | It's very hard to stand out. And then I think the point about fibers and all of that is also |
| 0:43.8 | really good to like keep in mind because of course we know that a lot of major brands, |
| 0:48.6 | we would expect them to be using like the best fibers, they're not necessarily doing so but I think that |
| 0:55.4 | that's one of the drawbacks of online shopping is that like you can't really see like you're |
| 1:00.8 | not really getting a good feel for the texture of the garments and for like the actual physical |
| 1:06.5 | feel of them and people aren't always necessarily looking out for like the fiber contents of their |
| 1:12.4 | pieces. So it's like, I think that that's something that gets lost in the sauce and then like if |
| 1:17.1 | the styling isn't really meant to like showcase that or isn't really like the website platform |
| 1:22.5 | itself isn't really pushing that forward, then like another kind of selling point for you as a smaller designer |
| 1:28.8 | is also getting lost. Yeah, and it's like people talk about, oh, even with film, or like with |
| 1:34.5 | music, they're like, there's nothing like the physical object, feeling the record, feeling the VHS |
| 1:39.4 | tape. That's technology. Fashion, we could get into the conversation of fashion as a technology. That's another conversation. But imagine it also being something you actually have to put on your physical body. Like clothing is corporeal. It's like it's like something that is physical. It's not ephemeral. Like we wear it. It's like it has the most functional purpose. So totally like the physical spaces is a really |
| 2:02.8 | important thing for obtaining clothing. Yeah, how something can move on you. And when you do have |
| 2:09.1 | these really stiff models sort of wearing the pieces the same way, like you're not getting a good |
| 2:14.8 | sense of that. And a friend of ours told me that like she now shops |
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