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How Supreme-Style Merch Drops Took Over Corporate America

Why are massive brands and startups selling Tesla shorts, McDonald’s chicken nugget pillows, and Stouffer’s hoodies?

Adam Bluestein
Marker
22 min readMar 3, 2021

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Illustration by James Clapham for Marker

In May 2020, confronting a raging pandemic, fierce competition from a slew of new entrants in the alternative-beverage category, and a limited marketing budget to support the launch of three new drink flavors, Ben Witte, CEO and founder of Recess, a maker of CBD-infused sparkling water, did what the head of any up-and-coming direct-to-consumer brand might: He dropped a merch line.

Featuring a “last two brain cells” hoodie ($65), a “cool your horses” T-shirt ($35), an orange “on recess” beanie, and a pair of $18 “around the block” socks (“for going nowhere in particular”), the line was designed, says Witte, with Instagram and Gen Z “creatives” in mind, a way to diffuse the brand’s pastel-minimalist aesthetic and the “tongue-in-cheek social commentary on millennial existence” on social media and beyond. Generating hundreds of tagged stories and posts a month, the merch did exactly what the brand had intended: For a CBD company operating in an advertising gray area, hoodies and beanies presented a way to cut through regulation and a saturated social media landscape and broadcast the brand’s chillness on Insta. Oh, and they managed to…

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Published in Marker

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Adam Bluestein
Adam Bluestein

Written by Adam Bluestein

I write about business, science, and things that people do for fun. Work published in Fast Company, Inc., Men’s Journal, Proto, Marker. Vermonter by choice.

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