
Luxury fashion e-comm giant Ssense is going offline and out-of-home.
The company is expanding its media strategy to include OOH advertising as part of its 20th anniversary, which it marked in October. The boards are going up in Toronto and Montreal starting today (November 13).
Targeting Ssense’s core demo of 18- to 40-year-olds, the new campaign moves away from typical product-focused OOH fashion creative, and focuses instead on text, explains Ssense head of creative and content, Thom Bettridge.
The billboards feature crowd-sourced content from social media, including memes and comments and were selected to reflect authentic, lighthearted sentiments SSense’s fans share online. For example, some billboards make fun of the difficulty of pronouncing the name of the company (which is, for the record, is pronounced as “essence”).

“For our shoppers–who are majority Gen Z and Millennials–the internet is their primary language,” says Bettridge, who explains that the OOH creative is meant to “feed the conversations” that customers are having online, offline, with the ultimate goal of making them feel heard. “We want to give our audience the pleasant surprise of seeing something they know online in a highly offline setting,” he says.
Ssense will also take its campaign to New York and Los Angeles, and the billboards will be up until the end of the year.
Ssense is “one of the most valuable luxury e-commerce operations in the world” with a 2021 valuation of $4.1 billion dollars, according to the New York Times.