Let me go establish this, Supreme as the best. So I put Supreme on my shirt, its on my chest. You got ta have Supreme or you will be I hate r because, you know, Supreme is super elevated. This is Supreme. The street wear brand that's rapidly changing the retail industry. People have broken into fights, waited hours and entered lotteries just to get inside. While, clothing stores are shuttering all over the world. Supreme is expanding, and the main reason these guys, better known as hypebeasts. With its limited production, Supreme is known for creating scarcity with each release and with no paid marketing whatsoever. Supreme has grown from a small underground streetwear brand into a one billion dollar global phenomenon. My name's Joe Migraine. I've been a Supreme collector for the better part of eight years now. Joe's sprawling Supreme collection has been valued to be over one hundred thousand dollars, featuring dozens of skate decks and rare pieces of apparel. But his favorite-- accessories are always what is very interesting to me. They are always out of left field. They always surprise you. And there's just a very collectible and a very interesting aspect about all of them. From pinball machines to nunchucks crowbars, even a brick hypebeasts like Joe, who treat Supreme items like valuable artifacts, are why the brand has a seemingly unshakable reputation. But its most popular item will always be-- the box logo tee is probably the most iconic item. Box logo merchandise on Supreme tends to sell for four to five x what it retails for. What's great about the Supreme Logo is is its simplicity. It's simple, it's clean. It pops and in our ADD culture, that logo breaks through instantly. The fashion industry spends five hundred billion dollars on advertising each year, but you won't find Supreme on billboards or magazines. It doesn't spend money on marketing their products at all. Everyone wants attention. Everyone wants to do marketing. Everyone wants, you know, influencers wearing their product. And Supreme operates the exact opposite way. The magic lies in their ability to take the word of mouth marketing and turn the launches of their products into sort of micro experiential events. In 1994, founder James Jebbia opened its flagship store in Soho, New York City, on Lafayette Street. Since then, Supreme has used a combination of high profile of brand collaborations and incredibly small production quantities to its advantage. But choking the supply wasn't necessarily a strategic decision, according to Jebbia. They didn't want to get stuck with unwanted inventory. This method is core to the company's business model, making every launch of press-worthy event and each item a limited edition collector's piece with skyrocketing value on the resale market. What did this retail for $40, $50? $45 maybe. And then resale is probably two or three hundred black medium. I'll never wear it. The narrative is that Supreme sells a t shirt for $30. It sells out immediately at retail and then people are paying on the aftermarket. 3, 4, 5, 6 x what it cost in the store. It's kind of like investing in something that, you know, will retain its value that, you know, will rarely ever go below what you paid for it. And then there's always a good chance that you will make more money than you spent on it. Every drop creates a sort of mania, attracting a market of young resellers. Some collectors even self-identifying as addicts. Supreme -Yankees box logo T-shirt. It was forty four dollars. Highest bid is currently four hundred and seventy and the cheapest anyone's willing to let it go is six hundred and seventeen dollars. Leopard fanny pack. Retail was sixty eight dollars and you can purchase it for three hundred on StockX. Right now the classic black box logo hoodie. This retails for one forty eight. And now the cheapest on Stock X is eleven hundred dollars. What makes for a successful brand is when that brand becomes an extension of self. It becomes a personal statement for the people who are using it. And in the case of Supreme, it became a badge of cool. But getting that badge of cool can be incredibly difficult. Which gives opportunistic retailers a chance to make a killing during drops. I've been asking everyone walking out the store to sell me items, sell me items. No one wants to sell. It's so easy to do this. I just don't think enough people know. This summer, I mean about $10,000, it's a pretty good summer job for me. Like, everyone wants to hold their items and wait for market to rise to sell. It's almost like an addiction. Like you buy one thing, you really like it. And then every year there's new Supreme items. It has its highs and its lows. When you get something that you really want, that's really rare. You feel really good. But on the flip side of that is that there's something that you've kind of been waiting for all season, when you don't get it, it's really sour feeling and then the problem is that the price is like me two or three or four times what Supreme sold it for. Even this plastic bag has some resell to it. You have around 10, someone would be willing to buy it off of you. And when you can penetrate the day -to -day lifestyle of your target audience in that way, that's a home run for the brand. Increasingly crowded store fronts, launch day brawls and angry retail neighbors have led Supreme to implement a lottery system with each product launch to reduce overcrowding. Supreme is only open to the public during their seasonal drops and they only release new merchandise on Thursdays. To get in, you have to sign up by 11:00 a.m. on Tuesday before the drop. Registry fills up insanely fast. If you get in, you'll get a text the day of the launch. Then you'll get another one telling you what time you can come, and then you can possibly wait in line for up to three to four hours just to get inside. With increasingly publicized collaboration, Supreme notoriety has led to both wanted and unwanted attention. In 2017, Jebbia confirmed that half the company was sold for five hundred million dollars to the Carlyle Group, a private equity corporation. But the public doesn't seem to care-- yet. How much is our outfit worth? Companies make investments in order to grow those investments, and so it's likely that the plan would be to expand the brand, sell more merchandise and profit further. But Supreme is managing to maintain its street cred. The evidence shows that they haven't stopped being who they are. Everything has been done exactly the same. You know, they've been fighting some big legal battles. A corporation like the Carlyle Group at your disposal to help fight those battles is something that they definitely need. Supreme has eleven stores in total with seven located outside of the U.S.. International fans, especially those in countries where Supreme doesn't have a footprint, pay just about any price to get their hands on authentic Supreme. The only way they can get their hands on this genuine apparel is on the secondary market. There's a lot of Chinese people here that have buyers overseas and they have these people here and they have lists of prices that they're willing to pay. They come up, they pay for it right away. They pull out thousands of dollars in cash. They'll pay anything. The Asian resale market, it's definitely, definitely big. If you live in a country that, you know, you can't buy online from, your only options are buying it from eBay, which you might be dealing with fakes. The other effect of product scarcity has been the rise in fakes. Biggest fake Supreme stone in the world. But it looks dead-ass identical man. That's mad, it's actually crazy. Which in March of 2019 resulted in a highly publicized lawsuit between Supreme and Supreme Italia, a brand with an identical logo that Supreme denounced as counterfeit. Since then, Supreme Italia has opened stores in Europe and Asia. In countries, Supreme has yet to reach. A lot of people who really know about Supreme, they're against it. Like, they would never buy that sh-t. They can compare every detail, from the stitching to the logo part, to the pattern, and to the label. But do people really care if the box logo on their tee is official supreme merchandise? When you buy street wear you're doing it to be part of a particular community. To circumvent the barriers to entry by buying a fake kind of misses the whole point. It's not about owning a Supreme tee shirt. It's about the concept of understanding the culture and putting yourself out there. I personally hate fakes. I'll never wear fakes. I don't want to own fakes. I don't want to look at fakes. I hate 'em. The legal battle also sparked a hypocracy debate with critics alleging that Supreme plagiarized their logo, whose design is nearly identical to the work of artist Barbara Kruger to begin with. Good artists, copy, great artists steal, like that's just kind of the name of the game with fashion. The red Futura bold is exactly like Barbara Kruger's artwork, but it is what it is. An irony that's not lost on Barbara Kruger. Supreme has continued their strong presence in the fashion industry, but the future of Supreme could be uncertain with private equity stakeholders involved. If the brand does go mass, it is, you know, contradictory to the way that it built its model with the limited edition releases, and that stands to potentially compromise its street cred. You can start to tell by what the public perception is and what people are writing on the Internet and talking about. But also you can tend to tell by resale value is declining or if the number of sales are declining. But Supreme seems to be getting bolder with their designs keeping hypebeasts loyal to the brand. Supreme is very self-aware and knows exactly what they're doing and they like, yeah, we're gonna do a brick and everyone is going to talk about it. I think they just continually push the boundary for like what's possible. The reason why people want to wear Supreme is because they want a piece of culture. A crowbar or a brick can, you know, it can last forever. Those things will be in museums in 50 years.
