Anyone even remotely interested in men’s clothing has experienced the unique and often complicated experience of buying a Supreme garment. About ten years ago, I decided to buy a hunter green corduroy five-panel hat with the brand’s iconic box logo. Like all other items available on the Supreme website that week, it sold out in an instant. So I had to go to the store in Los Angeles, where I waited in line under the scorching sun of Fairfax without knowing if the hat was in stock. Once inside, I found my prize. Certainly not thanks to the staff of rough skaters who, since James Jebbia opened the original Supreme store on Lafayette Street in 1994, have always been notoriously unaccommodating to intruders. There are numerous testimonies and hilarious reviews on Yelp about this.
Like many other young people before and after me, I loved every second of this shopping experience. Supreme’s business model was frustrating, but it was also brilliant in fueling the excitement and anticipation to the point of becoming a true obsession: the more you wanted something, the harder it was to buy it. Today, the experience is significantly different. Just over two years after Supreme‘s acquisition by VF, the parent company of The North Face, for $2.1 billion, the New York brand has started to resemble something that was once practically unimaginable: a normal fashion brand. The change has manifested itself in small and big ways. Following the custom of the rest of the fashion world, Supreme now has a creative director who responds to the public, Tremaine Emory, designer of Denim Tears, who began his activity early last year. Even the once bustling scenes outside Supreme stores, where a generation of hypebeasts camped out almost every Thursday morning before new products hit the shelves, have largely vanished. Most Supreme stores now feature a lottery queue system for delivery days, and the New York and Los Angeles stores have moved from their original compact storefronts to larger flagships.
The Supreme store in Williamsburg.
Courtesy of Supreme
It should not of course be forgotten that in the past even if Supreme is now hand in hand with the global fashion clothing industry, the credit is largely due to a skate shop, once shabby, that has rewritten the rules of the game. Many luxury brands now release limited edition products, and our screens and urban landscapes are flooded with advertising and sponsorships of unconventional fashion. Whenever you see a fashion brand enriching itself with unexpected cameos of celebrities, remember that Supreme has been showcasing labels for decades with anti-fashion icons like Neil Young and Kermit the Frog. Even skate gear and streetwear have been wholly absorbed by the luxury establishment, and the kind of surprising and original partnerships that Supreme knows how to undertake better than anyone else are now an accepted part of fashion’s commercial logic. Last June in Paris, Emory told me: “Every fashion brand is trying to do what ‘Preme has done for 30 years.” Emory was in town, somewhat ironically, for Supreme’s first party at Paris Fashion Week. Last month, the brand was the latest in a long line of big brands to host a party at the infamous Chateau Marmont, the Los Angeles hotspot chosen by luxury companies looking to do business with Hollywood.
However, the most surprising news is how easy it is to purchase Supreme items these days. At the beginning of March, the company marked what is essentially Christmas Day for its most avid fans, collectors, and resellers, by releasing its seasonal collaboration with The North Face. The Spring 2023 capsule included trompe l’oeil graphic parkas, fleece pullovers, backpacks, and other co-branded accessories. Matt Steiner managed Supreme Saint, a sort of personal shopping service that used bots to help paying customers secure what they wanted from the weekly drops. According to Steiner, North Face drops were one of the main selling opportunities for Supreme Saint in the 2016-2017 period when the service was in full swing. At the time, Steiner was attending high school in South Florida.
“North Face was very important,” Steiner explained. It was in the top three,” after the sales of Air Jordan and Nike. As soon as the jackets came out, Steiner’s bot, with the unwavering determination of good software, would buy hundreds and hundreds of them faster than a normal human being entering credit card details could: a lucrative activity, then replicated in countless ways by people ready to take advantage of the limited supply of Supreme products on resale sites like StockX.
As a result, Steiner was surprised when I revealed to him that on a Thursday afternoon, hours after the expected delivery time of 11:00, I could still add practically all the North Face collection products to my cart. In other words, the swarm of stock disposal bots did not materialize. “It’s absurd,” Steiner commented. “It has never happened. It would have been like saying: there is a huge issue with the website if the products are still in stock after five minutes.”
The problem was not the website but, apparently, the bots. Supreme has been engaged in an arms race against bot networks for years, introducing measures like Captcha forms and bot detection to discourage the most fervent hackers. Which hasn’t always worked: Steiner stopped managing Supreme Saint in 2017 not because he couldn’t outsmart the website anymore, but because there were too many rival botters.
However, it appears that Supreme has finally triumphed when earlier this year, the brand migrated its webstore to the ubiquitous e-commerce platform Shopify boasting robust bot protection services. Currently, according to the team in charge of the bot service Supercop claiming to be “in the lead” among all Supreme bots, when contacted via email earlier this week, “there is significantly less demand” for their services. “Supreme,” they continued, “has made things a bit harder than a normal Shopify store.” According to Supercop, Supreme’s best defense is not represented only technologically. “People are far less likely to impulse buy a bot now that Supreme has sold out of products and is producing significantly more quantities,” the company stated. Supercop is only speculating: no one really knows how much Supreme produces. However, it is reasonable to think that in an attempt to refocus on its core customer, the brand may be producing a greater number of garments. Especially now that they can leverage VF’s expertise in the supply chain (the company also owns The North Face, Dickies, Vans, and Timberland). A Supreme representative declined to comment
Thanks to Supreme’s expansion into new markets like China with a dedicated store at the November-opened Dover Street Market in Beijing, the brand is selling more box logo clothing than ever. According to VF, Supreme’s revenue reached $561.5 million for the year ended March 2022. VF’s expectations stopped at $500 million in revenue. In 2017, that figure was around $200 million.
Another sign of Supreme’s transition to a new period of normality is that the increase in sales has coincided with an apparent decline in the collectibility of the brand. According to at least one parameter, the value of Supreme items in the secondary market, while still inflated, is approaching the real value. Cynthia Lee, VP of Merchandising at the leading reseller StockX, indicates that the average markup of Supreme clothing and accessories sold on the site decreased from 67% in 2020 to 57% in 2022, while the overall sales volume remained stable. If Steiner’s experience is indicative, it is likely that other people interested in shaping the secondary market, driven by hype, have also exited the game as Supreme landed on the ground, normalizing itself. “I think it’s a natural trend,” observed Steiner, who told me he had noticed a sense of fatigue among people who possess collectibles for superfan objects like Supreme nunchucks. “I mean, even some of my biggest collector friends are really tired. We’re talking about a brand that releases something on the same day and time every week.”
Straight Steiner, currently involved in the Brooklyn-based art and fashion collective MSCHF, took a step forward: the last Supreme item he bought was a collaboration with Kaws in 2021. “When will it become banal to have, for example, my Supreme fire extinguisher, my cutlery, my cup?” he said.
However, just before 11:00 am on a recent Thursday morning, the scene outside the Supreme store on Bowery was pretty much like those of the past. The air was chilly, and about 50 people patiently waited in a line that stretched the length of the store, while the tattooed Supreme employees loaded cardboard boxes full of clothes through the entrance doors. The novelty of the day was a Supreme x Tamagotchi toy.
When the store opened, I started chatting with a student named Jordan who lined up. Jordan, dressed in a Bape hoodie, said he didn’t want the Tamagotchi: he was there, on his fourth trip in the last few years, to take a look at the shelves. “I just want to check out the drop and see what’s in store,” he said. He didn’t know, I asked him, that he could buy practically everything online? “Yes,” he replied. “But it’s nice to touch and be able to hold stuff in my hands,” Jordan explained, “instead of buying it online.” For a certain type of Supreme customer, some things will never change.