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