But if Supreme knows an item is selling, they’ll stop making it, never make it again, and try something else.” This is why, as Peter explains, “Supreme is the only brand whose clothing becomes more expensive as time passes. In the event that an item does sell, according to Peter, Supreme has a plan: “Every other brand besides Supreme sees a design that sells out, and so they make it over and over. (Perhaps Peter miscalculated-mysteriously, the Piss Face Zip-Up, which costs a hundred and thirty-eight dollars, is sold out in blue in Japan, where it costs two hundred and fifty-eight dollars and thirty cents.) This season, Supreme is selling a zip-up hoodie with a quotation, attributed to the skateboarder Mark Gonzales, that reads, in bright letters across the back, “I’ve never wanted to piss on someones face more than I want to piss on yours.” Many of Supreme’s items sell out online within seconds of going on sale, but the “Piss Face Zip-Up” has not sold out in any color after weeks on the Web site.
Perhaps most important, the brand makes a lot of clothing that its employees know they will not sell-they sometimes express surprise that customers are buying certain items. The store’s speakers play rap and heavy metal at nearly wall-shaking volume in the middle of the afternoon. (In the nineteen-nineties, staff members were known for walking up behind customers and menacingly telling them that they could not touch the clothing until they bought it.) Staff members keep a handful of sold-out items in the back for when their friends come in. The in-store staff is mostly aloof, surly. The brand, as a whole, does not seem eager to please. Supreme has reached its level of popularity through business practices that most brands would find unconscionable. I’ll wait until they sell out and then sell them for even more!” “If they want to undercut me on price, go ahead. Too much attention.” Because Peter and other resellers deal in goods whose demand generally wildly exceeds their supply, they don’t compete with each other on price. Peter was more careful: “ I only got thirty-five pairs. According to Peter, a major flipper he’s friends with, username “croatianstyle” (“I party with him when I go to Cali”), recently got a call from Nike after he bought a hundred pairs of Air Yeezy sneakers, the ones designed by Kanye West that can sell for upwards of five thousand dollars a pair on eBay. Peter, who has been buying and wearing Supreme clothing since the nineteen-nineties, communicates with other “major flippers” online, discussing potential markets and keeping tabs on the companies whose wares they sell. There were only two stores in New York that had them, so I called the stores and told them I wanted to buy everything they had whenever they got the Kit Kats in.” You could sell the bags for sixteen dollars each. Now they’re twenty dollars!” He adds, “I used to do green-tea Kit Kats. Like, the day after Obama was elected, I got copies of the Daily News for fifty cents each. Peter, who was born in Guangzhou, refers to himself as a “major flipper,” a businessman who will buy and resell, well, anything: “clothing, real estate, food, anything. With the eBay store, I even pack it and ship it myself,” he said, before pausing and thinking about this for a second.
(Peter was actually under only four eyes: two posters of Lady Gaga looking at the camera while modelling a Supreme T-shirt hung on the ceiling above him.) “I do everything myself.
“I can’t show my face-I’m under a lot of eyes,” he said, sitting on a stool inside Unique Hype Collection last week. “I’ve brought in seven figures a year for the last two years,” said Peter, the owner of the store, a thirty-year-old who refused to give his last name or be photographed. The store even uses authentic Supreme shopping bags, recycled from purchases made at Supreme. On a recent Friday afternoon, a cap that had gone on sale on Thursday at Supreme for forty-eight dollars was on the shelf at Unique Hype Collection for eighty-five dollars, where teen-agers were eyeing it jealously. Much of its merchandise goes to Japan, where Supreme goods can cost twice what they do here at retail. The enterprise, which its owner refers to as Unique Hype Collection, is in the business of buying clothing from the skate-inspired men’s fashion brand Supreme at retail prices, waiting until the items have sold out at Supreme’s physical stores and online shop, and then putting those items up for sale in the mall and on eBay at significant markups. It has no sign and it’s not on the mall directory. Inside a run-down mall off of Elizabeth Street in Chinatown, down an escalator to the basement and past a raft of empty storefronts, is a minuscule store, the size of a walk-in closet, that’s quietly at the center of a peculiar global fashion empire.
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