Buying Clothes to Resell Them: the Supreme Cult

Soho is home to one of just 10 Supreme outposts in the world. You can hardly miss its bouncer, red carpet and velvet rope, not to mention the queue that stretches around the block several times a week. Is it a high-end club? An exciting pop-up? Actually, it’s just a clothes and accessory shop selling overpriced crap to people who should get some taste or a better hobby. But this is also a brand that has inspired such a strong marketing buzz that some devotees are making tidy profits simply by buying and reselling its goods.

James Jebbia created Supreme as a New York skateboarding shop in 1994. Born in the US, he lived in Sussex until he was 19 and moved to New York in the early 1980’s. Now his dedicated teenage clientele pay as much as £124 for a pair of slim jeans or £99 for a polka-dot shirt.

And that is before they might be resold for higher prices. Weekly “drops” or releases of small parts of the latest collection keep people talking. Such drops generate queues of eager fans and avid resellers who are desperate to get their hands on the latest products of this marketing machine.

The preference for buying from one of the “bricks and mortar” stores makes more sense when you see the Supreme online shop, a cryptic mass with narrow bands of unlabelled photographs forming links to each category (left). Instead of seeing all their T-shirts at once you have to flick through a slideshow. An edgy type-writer font is used throughout with little actual information about the garments.

What Drives The Price?

Anastasia Baker (@Werbykov on Instagram) is studying for a Masters degree in Fashion Media Practice & Criticism at London College of Fashion. She told Felix Magazine that Supreme “has an appeal to subcultures through this aspect of exclusivity.”

“Once the products have dropped you have to get them now or not at all unless you are willing to pay three times the price,” she said. “Its collaborations and branding – a mix of high and low culture – appeals to a wide audience.” Asked if its extortionate pricing is due to resellers, Anastasia said that was probably only a minor factor in the high prices.

What about the quality? “For the price, the quality isn’t too shabby. At such high prices you do have to use a luxury range of materials – and the collaborations are of a high standard also.” However, there are reports of the sacred logos crumbling off after just a few washes. Maybe Supreme wearers aren`t meant to get dirty. I suppose the need for washing could be prevented by wearing Primark underneath.

Will you be able to resell Supreme for a profit in 50 years like an antique watch? “It depends on how the brand progresses,” says Baker. “Supreme has only been around since the 1990’s and more recently become a fashion trend. It’s hard to tell, particularly in comparison to brands that would definitely gain value like Chanel, Versace, Louis Vuitton or Burberry.”

Have you ever queued? “Yes, but half unintentionally! I was horrified when I found what was happening and left immediately.”

Accessories

Supreme also creates a range of accessories. They have collaborated to produce skateboards with famous artists like H.R. Giger, the designer behind the “Alien” film franchise, and US artist Jeff Koons. They have also branded such unusual “accessories” as a brick, fire extinguishers and bolt cutters, now available on eBay for £200.

 

The Supreme Resellers

Facebook is full of resell pages offering users a marketplace to buy and sell Supreme products. Those pages have enough rules in their “about” sections to make it clear that buyers should be very careful before opening their wallets.  A common rule is you must actually own the item and photograph it with your name in the photo, which suggests people have tried to sell items they do not own, or perhaps have bought online but not yet received. “Bumping” is the act of commenting on a post just so it returns to the prominent top position on the page, and these pages see a lot of activity.
Even on the more traditional eBay there is the same minefield of rare collaboration pieces and buyers with inside knowledge. Some fairly casual auctions produce a moderate £50 or so for T-shirts but a recently released Lacoste hoodie was fought for by five bidders (left) and sold for £270, almost doubling the original price of £158. The seller described it frankly as a “Really dope piece and really hyped.” Even after fees they banked about £70 for just one item.

We asked Anastasia Baker if all the effort that people are putting into reselling Supreme meant that somebody could actually make a living from this parasitic trade. “It’s so difficult to get some of the more wanted products,” she said. “It’s a lot of time with both the queuing and online buying. There’s no definite rule of what products would sell. It would take a lot of time and effort, probably not something you could rely on to live. As for the ethics, with the difficulties in buying the products and reselling you could essentially argue the reseller deserves the money for making the effort.”

At the higher end, an online seller in Hong Kong boasted of the rectangular graphic on his hoodie: “one of the rarest box logos on the market”. This plain blue piece from 2006 had a Buy it Now price of a staggering £2,400. The secrets to dealing in Supreme products seem to be knowing the gems, having a bit of luck and not giving up the day job. – Stewart Vickers @VickHellfire

The post Buying Clothes to Resell Them: the Supreme Cult appeared first on Felix Magazine.