‘Hype’ brands and their economic power

In the eyes of most people, clothing is obtained by an individual with the sole purpose of being worn. Granted in some cases, clothes and shoes can be purchased with the intention of collecting – this is particularly popular with trainers, or ‘sneakers’ as they are known in the US. For example, musician and social media phenomenon, DJ Khaled, has a sneaker collection amounting to 10,000 pairs. Not all the shoes are different, but some are one-of-a-kind. He even owns a pair of Nike’s limited edition ‘Air Mags’, the self-lacing shoes that brought Marty McFly’s futuristic hi-tops from Speilberg’s Back to the Future 2 to life. The impressive collection is estimated to be worth over $400,000 although recent auctions for the ‘Air Mags’ have seen the sneaker sell for $200,000, despite their original $10,000 retail value.

But aside from collection, 99% of us would rather spend our money elsewhere and when it comes to clothes, we buy things that we like the look of to wear day to day. Whether you are interested in fashion and spending a sizeable amount of your income on clothes or not, the purpose of the clothes you buy is still the same. However, the emergence of streetwear ‘hype’ brands may change your reasons for buying clothes altogether (a hype brand is simply a clothing or fashion brand that is currently on trend and is highly desirable). Clothing brands such as Supreme, Palace, Jordan’s or Kanye West’s ‘Yeezy’ and ‘Pablo’ merchandise, present an economic opportunity never seen before.

When it comes to valuable clothing, popularity is key – this may seem obvious but let me explain. Supreme, for example, started out as a simple streetwear brand in 1994 New York and was popular among skaters, but that was pretty much it. However, the brand changed forever when, in 2011, hip-hop artist Tyler, The Creator and his group Odd Future (OFWGKTA) began wearing Supreme clothing in their music videos and were regularly seen sporting the brand in posts on social media sites such as Instagram and Twitter. The brand at the time was unknown, fresh and presented the opportunity for fans of Tyler and Odd Future to mimic their idols through their underground clothing. Tyler’s music video for the song ‘She’ featuring Frank Ocean was the first time we had seen the brand on a popular artist. Supreme however, despite the surge in demand for its products, remained true to its core and continued to stock a very limited supply of its items. The exclusivity of Supreme moulded it into a sort of cult, with its fans creating Facebook groups and Reddit threads with the sole purpose of discussing Supreme and buying, selling or trading items. As Supreme’s popularity grew, more recognisable hip/hop and rap artists jumped on the bandwagon, with stars such as Gucci Mane, ASAP Rocky, Drake and even Kanye West seen wearing the brand.

With Supreme products being so difficult to buy, the online market for Supreme blew up. On Websites such as eBay and Depop, Supreme products are sold to the world for incredibly inflated prices. One example can be seen in the inflation of the ‘Box Logo’ hoodie. On the 8^th of December 2016, Supreme released new versions of the already existing ‘Box Logo’ hoodie with never seen before colours like peach and olive green  The hoodies retailed in store and online for £150 but were seen selling online later that day – when the shop and website had run out of stock – for £700. The dramatic increase in prices is seen more severely in collaborations, where Supreme will team up with well-known brands such as The North Face, Nike, Air Jordan, Vans, Levi’s and Stone Island (to name a few). When collaborations are released, demand hits an all-time high, as the items released are likely to be one-of-a-kind and may never be stocked in stores again. In a collaboration with The North Face in 2014, Supreme released an expedition jacket that retailed in stores for $338 but is now listed online (if you can find them due to their rarity) for up to $1200. So, if the resell value is so high on these products, how can I buy them for retail price? You might ask. Well, if you want to buy items for retail price you have to either visit the store or the website on the day of a re-stock. Seems easy, right? Wrong.

Purchasing products on the website is near enough impossible as everything sells out in a matter of seconds; with people investing money in computer ‘bots’ (computer programmes that do stuff very quickly for you) to get the goods first. In addition, Supreme has only 10 stores worldwide, with London and Paris hosting the only stores outside of the US and Japan meaning that option 1: visit the shop, is unachievable for many people across the world. If you are lucky enough to live in a Supreme store city then why not pop down at 11 o’clock on Thursday morning when the shop opens after a re-stock and grab yourself a new T-shirt. This is where option 2 might get in your way.

Option 2: you have to queue. On Thursday of every week, Supreme sees queues that are only comparable to that of the queues seen outside Carphone Warehouse when the new iPhone is released for the first time, or outside Game when the new PlayStation debuts on shelves. The queues can last anything from two hours, to 24 hours, with most people prepared to sit on the street outside the store for the majority of Wednesday night, to ensure they get their gear. In April 2014, Supreme was releasing a limited edition sneaker with Nike called the ‘Foamposite’. The crowd attending the store in New York on release day was so large that the NYPD was forced to shut down the opening and send everyone home empty handed. The story seemed so bizarre that it reached international news. Queues like this are seen across all ‘hype’ brands.

Palace opened its first London store in 2015 right around the corner from its skating-turned-fashion counterpart, Supreme. Despite Palace not having quite the same global firepower as Supreme, the same rules apply. The products found in store sell for a relatively reasonable retail price in comparison to the exceptionally large resell value. Palace also enjoy a collaboration every now and then, famously joining forces with Adidas to produce some very limited and very valuable products. Palace, in some ways, rose to stardom off of the back of Supreme’s popularity. It provided an alternative to Supreme that still produced the same sort of underground products to fit the growing skate-wear trend. The same goes for Kanye West’s ‘Pablo’ merchandise that appears once every so often in pop-up shops around the US, generating large queues and seeing all stock sell out on the day of opening.

Unlike the impossible battle on the website, it is possible to purchase Supreme, Palace and Yeezy products from the store, you just have to face the queue. Or do you?

The emergence of the reseller

As people caught on to the economic possibilities present by these ‘hype’ brands, more and more people were found queueing at the stores to buy the clothes, but never to wear them. People who resell ‘hype’ products online, or ‘resellers’, usually start out by facing the notoriously large queues head-on and will sit for hours before spending as much as they are allowed on the goodies in store. The second they arrive home, the items will go up for sale on eBay, Depop, Facebook, Instagram, etc so that people who didn’t get to the shop on time earlier that day, will be able to get their hands on the new products. This comes at a price however as, as previously mentioned, resellers will be asking for a considerably larger figure than that of retail and so will make their first bit of profit. Resellers will rinse and repeat this system until they start seeing some serious numbers in their bank accounts.

What’s perhaps most interesting about this is that it doesn’t matter how old you are, you can do this, it’s only buying clothes. Granted, if you’re under 18 then you should probably be in school on Thursday morning but, if you’re not, you can be making some serious pocket money. For young people, where a Saturday job at Tesco might make you something like £60 a week sitting behind a till for 10 hours, one visit to a Supreme store could see you banking £200+ depending on what will be in store on that week.

As resellers have grown, new ways have been discovered to make the money without doing the hard bit (as if queueing is really that hard). Once enough money has been made from reselling, some resellers will walk over to the store half an hour before it opens and head straight to the front of the queue. They’ll offer people at the front of the queue a sum of cash to go in and buy things for them, rather than for the person themselves. Because you are only allowed to purchase one of each item, the reseller will look to invest in the help of other people to get as much as they can from one restock. They might offer someone in the queue, for example, £400 to buy a T-shirt and a jumper amounting to £300. The person will then go into the store and buy whatever they were planning on buying along with what the reseller has asked for then hand the loot over to the reseller but keep the change. This is repeated with multiple people in the queue, allowing the reseller to get hold of as much stock as possible.

The reseller debate

The process of reselling does carry some moral issues. Fans of brands like Supreme struggle to get the clothes they want as the existence of reselling has encouraged people who have no interest in the clothes whatsoever (apart from their money-making potential) to start queueing and buying and so have forced those fans to either pay extortionate rates or give up on the brand altogether. Because of this, many resellers go about their business as secretively as possible and do their best to avoid being recognised as a reseller as, not only do the brands themselves dislike what resellers do, they're also very unpopular amongst the true fan base. It can also be argued that, while reselling is a good way to make some easy money for young people, it doesn’t possess any traits of a real-life workplace and could result in a distorted view of what working life really is.      

I’m excited to speak to some people who know more about this subject and further develop my knowledge on what reselling and ‘hype’ brands are all about.