ALOCS Merch Sizing Guide By Desto Dubb

Act one: the rapper came first

There was a catalogue of records before there was a clothing label. Desto Dubb, who was raised in Watts, in South Los Angeles, was working as a rapper well before anyone printed his phrase on a hoodie. XXL covered him on March 18, 2017, writing about his EP Born to Sale Juice, which had arrived in early October 2016. That date explains more about the brand than the founding mythology does, thats an awful lot of cough because it fixes the music as the earlier of his two careers. Because they were written by someone who writes track titles, the graphics read like track titles. Most streetwear founders come from design, retail or resale; this one came from the studio, and the difference comes through in how the company later behaved.

The recorded work on the board

Inside the Los Angeles rap scene rather than beside it is where his recorded work locates him. He has recorded with Lil Uzi Vert, Lil Pump, Smokepurpp and 03 Greedo on the track “Bankteller”, a line-up spanning West Coast street rap and the SoundCloud generation. More recently, “Dead Homies” featuring Veeze appears on streaming services as a single, a distinction worth keeping straight, since several write-ups describe it as an album when the streaming listing does not. Press coverage applies the same loose treatment to a handful of his other releases, with tracks promoted to albums by writers working from press kits. Before naming a release, checking it on the platform is a minute’s work and avoids repeating an error that has now travelled a long way. The music remains live alongside the business, which is not the usual arrangement for a founder running three storefronts.

Act two: the van, the parking lot and the phrase

What is now That’s A Awful Lot Of Cough Syrup started in 2018. That year is indicated by two records: the trademark for the phrase lists first use in November 2018, and an AllHipHop profile from November 2023 describes the brand marking five years. The company’s own about page says the selling began out of a van in a parking lot in downtown Los Angeles. Later coverage sometimes dates the van during the pandemic, but where accounts conflict the trademark filing and the anniversary piece are firmer. What is not in dispute is the method: stock in a vehicle, buyers in person, no wholesale accounts and no season calendar. That approach still shapes the business, and small batches land every week or two rather than twice a year.

The name was there before the company was. A viral clip is where it comes from, one in which an officer’s line became the brand name, and the circumstances are contested, with material online claiming it was staged and no primary transcript resolving it. The phrase names promethazine-codeine cough syrup, known in rap slang as lean, which the company acknowledges rather than promotes; its website carries a standing banner reading “! PLEASE DO NOT SIP DRANK AND SHOOT FIREARMS !”. The part worth attending to is what Desto Dubb did with the line, because a joke that trends for a week rarely converts into a trademark and three shops. He registered the phrase, printed it large, and made the wordmark itself the product. The version most people type is the searcher spelling thats an awful lot of cough syrup, yet the registered mark uses “A” rather than “An”.

Act three: where the business stands in 2026

The Melrose flagship at 7669 Melrose Avenue is the clearest measure of the distance travelled from the van. Desto Dubb has used the street number as his own social media display name, a sign of how much of the brand is bound up in one address. Two further locations are listed, at 312 West 5th Street in Los Angeles and 5410 Almeda Road in Houston, though the company publishes no store locator and no opening hours. Alongside them runs its own online store, where the catalogue sits at roughly 154 products and refreshes constantly. In its product copy the company states the garments are made in Los Angeles and describes itself as a Black-owned business. At the upper end of independent streetwear the prices hold steady: a tee is about $150 at the brand’s own store as of September 2026, with hoodies and sweatpants about $200 each, and those figures move with stock and season.

Festivals, collaborations and one tribute

The biggest expansion in visibility came in March 2024, when the brand partnered with Rolling Loud California from the 14th to the 17th at Hollywood Park in Inglewood. That activation was not a merch booth but a carnival, with arcade games, a swing ride and two onsite stores, a large bet for a label barely five years old. The surrounding month was crowded, with a 310babii collaboration announced on March 11, a Got Sole pop-up following on March 19, and a Dodger Collection arriving on March 29. Before that, on April 28, 2023, the label released “That’s A Awful Lot of Legendary” with BlueBucksClan at the Melrose store, a limited drop honouring the late Drakeo The Ruler. That one reads less like marketing and more like a neighbourhood gesture, which is roughly how the brand has handled its music-world ties throughout. A Berner’s Cookies collaboration had launched earlier the same month, and Trapstar London published a joint piece through its own accounts in April 2024.

A note on what he is called

Searching his name throws up two different legal identities, which is a problem worth handling carefully rather than repeating. One of them is borne out by the documentary record: the United States trademark for the brand phrase is registered to Joshua Kashif Taylor, and every post on the company’s own blog carries a matching byline. Two separate records agree there, one filed with a federal agency and one published by the business itself. The other name in circulation appears on an unsourced commercial content site with nothing behind it, and it should not be repeated as fact. In practice it matters little to a reader, since the brand, its collaborators and its stores use one name. He is Desto Dubb, and that is how his own company refers to him.

Career timeline

The timeline below is built from dated coverage, the trademark record and the brand’s own posts, and it leaves out anything that could not be pinned to a date. Reading it in order is worth it, since the sequence is the argument: music, then phrase, then storefronts, then festival-scale activations. Notice how tightly clustered March 2024 is, with four separate events in nineteen days. Note too the twenty months between the first XXL coverage and the trademark’s first-use date, which is how long the phrase took to become an asset. Anything here covering prices or catalogue size was accurate in September 2026 and will drift. Dates for the store openings are missing, since the company has never published them.

Reading the story straight

The version of this career in circulation online is tidier than the evidence supports, and the tidying mostly runs in the brand’s favour. In that version a staged or unstaged clip becomes a documented arrest, singles become albums, and a handful of unsourced celebrity sightings become a client list. None of it is needed, since the checkable version is already unusual: a working rapper from Watts turned a piece of slang into a registered mark, sold the first pieces himself, and built alocs clothing into a business with a Melrose flagship inside six years. The parts that hold up are these: the trademark, the dated collaborations, the addresses and the prices. The parts that do not are the origin anecdote in its confident form and the roll-call of famous wearers. For anyone writing about awful lot of cough syrup the first list serves better, and it is long enough on its own.