Hi, and welcome back to Line Sheet. A friend asked me if I save scoops for Thursday’s extra-special Inner Circle subscribers, and the answer is that I never save scoops! But there are a lot of scoops in today’s issue, and I do try to make Thursday as fun and informative as humanly possible. More than anything, I always ensure that Thursday’s issue is mission-critical for those of you in the industry. Join us here.

Today, Rachel Strugatz has fresh intel on a top-secret Sephora launch involving some of the beauty industry’s most compelling names. Plus, an update on that Barneys TV show; another round of celebrity stylist musical chairs; and a look at the state of Ssense, the Montreal-based, mostly online retailer that has become incredibly influential in making (or breaking) young labels during the past decade. Just a few years ago, Ssense seemed well on its way to an I.P.O. after a funding round, led by Sequoia Capital China, that valued the company at $4 billion. Now, post-post-pandemic boom, and in the swirl of Trump’s tariffs, things are different.

Programming note: Tomorrow on Fashion People, my guest is Michael Grynbaum, author of Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America. After this, I promise we will never speak of 4 Times Square again. (Just kidding!) Listen here and here.

Mentioned in this issue: Ssense, LVMH, Rami, Firas, and Bassel Atallah, Givenchy, Riccardo Tisci, Alexander Wang, Cheap Monday, Joerg Koch, Angelica Cheung, Marie Adam-Leenaerdt, Nensi Dojaka, Sephora, Mazdack Rassi, Melanie Bender, Boy Smells, Kayali, Barneys, Zoë Kravitz, Danielle Goldberg, and many, many more…

A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR

The Cost-Cutting Playbook for Modern Brands

Global commerce is only getting more complex—and inefficiency is getting more expensive.

Swap’s Unified Commerce Report breaks down how forward-thinking brands are cutting costs and reclaiming margin by streamlining their operations from the inside out.

Inside, you’ll find the 5 C’s of Connected Commerce, plus real examples from brands like Zara, Nike, and Glossier.

From fulfillment to compliance to inventory accuracy—it’s the growth-minded playbook your tech stack needs in 2025.

👉Get the full report and start scaling smarter: Download Now

And now, let's talk some Ssense…

Walking the floor of the LVMH Prize semifinal tells you a lot about the current and future state of the fashion industry. For the past 12 years, more than a dozen competing designers have convened for just a few days in a large exhibition space at the front of 22 Avenue Montaigne—each standing beside a rack of their clothing, explaining exactly what they stand for and why. There’s plenty betrayed in everything from the techniques employed to the materials sourced, but I am always most fascinated by their answer to my simple question: Where are you selling?

In the early days, Colette or Dover Street Market—sometimes Matches—were typical answers. (Some of these designers are so green, of course, that they either don’t have an answer or it’s nowhere at all.) But as the years passed, more and more designers led with Ssense, the Montreal-based, mostly online retailer founded in 2003 by Syrian immigrants Rami, Firas, and Bassel Atallah.

A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR

5 Steps to Winning in Q4

The holiday rush is coming—but the smartest commerce brands are already preparing.

Swap’s new guide lays out five essential strategies to get ahead of peak season chaos. From cross-border fulfillment to tax compliance and returns, it’s your blueprint for a smoother Q4—and stronger margins.

Inside, you’ll find:

🎯 The key ops moves to make in July—not October

🌍 How to go global with zero surprises at checkout

📦 How leading brands are turning returns into retention

This is the growth-minded playbook your ops team needs to win Q4.

Download the full guide

I first visited Ssense in Old Montreal in 2011, long before LVMH Prize designers even batted the name around. Back then, it was simply a local shop that sold Riccardo Tisci’s Givenchy, Alexander Wang, and Cheap Monday. I thought it was nice, but nothing to write home about—which mattered, given that I was working at Lucky, a magazine about shopping.

More notably, the company had adopted the new religion of e-commerce in 2006, and built a decent-size online retail business, at least by the standards of the day. There was a crop of local retailers—Matches in the U.K., Mytheresa in Germany, Totokaelo in Seattle, and Luisaviaroma in Rome—that were early enough to this new game that they could optimize for search without spending too much money on marketing. The most successful, of course, eventually became global brands. But by the time C.E.O. Rami Atallah opened Ssense’s new Old Montreal flagship, in 2018, the store had become a spot for cool hunting, both online and off.

This was in part due to an unorthodox, and ultimately shrewd, choice the Atallahs had made, a few years earlier, when they hired Joerg Koch, the force behind the Berlin insider magazine 032c, to run editorial. While there was rarely a clear and easy conversion between the content and the commerce, the editorial created a top-of-funnel awareness machine. Ssense became a sort of finishing school for Canadian writers, editors, buyers, and art directors who wanted to be on the global fashion stage—Bonjour Tristesse writer and director Durga Chew-Bose had already published a book when she became the site’s managing editor in 2019. While Koch is no longer involved with the Ssense editorial, he sells 032c’s growing fashion line on the site.

For the no-counter-culture generation, Ssense became a place to discover new brands. And sure, there’s an argument that retailers like Ssense have damaged the prospects of local indie boutiques by offering a broader range of product and discounting deeper. (The Ssense sale is to Gen Z kids what the Nordstrom sale is to Gen X suburbanites.) But in truth, the Atallahs have exposed brands and designers like Marie Adam-Leenaerdt, Nensi Dojaka, and Mfpen to a whole new group of people who wouldn’t otherwise have heard of them, let alone be able to access them at a local store.

They also leaned heavily into the rise of merch-as-fashion, at one point generating hundreds of millions of dollars a year on Fear of God Essentials alone, and selling lots of sneakers. Their business grew so significantly—especially in China—that they were able to raise an undisclosed minority stake from the Chinese arm of Sequoia Capital at a $4.1 billion valuation in 2021, riding high off the peak-pandemic e-commerce boom that buoyed so many competitors. Former Vogue China editor-in-chief Angelica Cheung, a partner at Sequoia China, now called HongShan, joined the Ssense board. What could possibly go wrong?

Four years since the raise, Ssense might be more influential than ever. (What other annual sale has this many memes?) But the market is hardly the same. In some ways, the company has been most publicly challenged by Trump’s tariff shenanigans, which management cited when they laid off 8 percent of their staff in May. In recent days, I’ve heard multiple tales of shoppers getting hit with charges of hundreds of dollars in duties. As my partner Sarah Shapiro reported earlier this week, Ssense offered affected customers 20 percent off their next purchase, although I assume the tariffs will still deter certain customers—especially those who tend to buy in bulk, and try on a bunch of things before returning a significant portion of them—from taking advantage of the promotion.

But it’s not just the tariff predicament. Sales at Ssense.com have been trending up and down—but mostly down—since their peak in 2021 at just under $800 million, reflecting not only the significant retraction of the China market, but also the post-pandemic slowdown in purchases of sweats and fashion t-shirts. (The company had no comment regarding revenue.) Then Habashi, a kinda corny Canadian incredibly well-liked by staff, quit with no job in sight in February. (I was told by a person close to him that he was interested in pursuing a gig in another sector, that he gave the Atallahs plenty of notice, and the split was, naturally, amicable.) More recently, Brigitte Chartrand, the Atallahs’ longtime womenswear buyer, was poached by Net-a-Porter to lead buying and merchandising under new C.E.O. Heather Kaminetsky.

I reached out to Ssense to see about the plan to manage all this. What were they gonna do? A rep got back to me, noting that the company creates its “investment budgets within the context of the macroeconomic environment, among other factors, as is standard practice. Our value proposition, and every investment we make, is purposeful and disciplined, designed to reinforce our distinct point of view. It’s this unique perspective that draws our customers to Ssense, and we’re committed to ensuring it remains our core differentiator.”

The Atallahs have done far more with less in the past, but they haven’t faced these sorts of headwinds—an uncertain I.P.O. exit, an even murkier China rebound situation, and the challenges of Trump’s tariffs. These are the moments when being family run—and controlled—can offer a significant advantage. The question is, are the Atallahs more like the Pressmans (who had to give up Barneys New York in the 1990s), or the Goodmans (who let go decades ago but still profit off Bergdorf Goodman’s real estate)? Or maybe the Nordstroms, who have recently wrested back control of their family business, but not without sacrifices. At some point, someone, or something, has to give.

Line Sheet A-lister Jens Grede is now an investor in Substack, along with Bond, The Chernin Group, and Rich Paul. [Substack’s Substack]

Phoebe Philo is opening her first permanent store on Carlos Place in an old office building, across the street from The Row. What a doubleheader. By the way, you can also get Phoebe Philo via FWRD personal shopper. [WWD]

If you want to know whom to hit up for money, check out this list of retail’s highest-paid C.E.O.s. [WWD]

Sales at Puig—owner of Dries Van Noten, Byredo, and Charlotte Tilbury—jumped 8 percent in the first quarter of its fiscal year. [Reuters]

Fashion content on Substack has apparently doubled in the past year, generating $10 million of the company’s roughly $45 million in revenue. [BoF]

Christian Bale, Timothée Chalamet… the buzz cut is the cut of the summer. [Miami’s Community News]

Derek Blasberg’s newsletter is especially fun when he offers access to things other people can’t access, like photos of Mark Guiducci babysitting his kid. [And Another Thing]

Jonathan Kam, founder of Shiro “post-luxury” socks, asked me to answer some questions for his Substack. [Shiro Journal]

I’m super sad that Above the Fold, the newspaper stand in Los Angeles’s Larchmont neighborhood, closed on Sunday. I went up to the owner a few weeks ago and asked him a couple of questions. At that point, he didn’t know what would end up happening, but he did tell me that business has shrunk significantly in the past decade, and even more in the past few years. Long live print, but also: Remember that it doesn’t have the same purpose that it once did. [Larchmont Chronicle]

And finally… many people have remarked on the suit that newly appointed Santa Maria Novella C.E.O. Ludivine Pont is wearing in her portrait. I’m told it’s Saint Laurent (#Keringforever) and a Charvet shirt.

Until tomorrow,
Lauren

P.S.: We are using affiliate links because we are a business. We may make a couple bucks off them.

Puck founding partner Matt Belloni takes you inside the business of Hollywood, using exclusive reporting and insight to explain the backstories on everything from Marvel movies to the streaming wars.

The industry's go-to source for unflinching reporting on the trillion-dollar business of artificial intelligence - perhaps the single most important technology of our time. Ian Krietzberg, the powerhouse journalist behind The Deep View, delivers twice-weekly insights into the latest dealmaking and breakthroughs in A.I., and how the intersecting worlds of finance, entertainment, media, and politics are being transformed in its wake.

Puck is published by Heat Media LLC. 107 Greenwich St, New York, NY 10006