The State of The Drop Culture
Is it cool that everything good is a "limited time only" drop now?
Baggu x Sandy Liang collab is something I’ve been thinking about over and over again for months now. For those unfamiliar - Baggu, a popular sustainable accessories brand, collaborated with Sandy Liang, a popular women’s clothing designer, on a limited drop of bags. The collab was hugely popular. Like unbelievably popular despite the drop items not being all that original for both brands design-wise. The bags were the same as Baggu’s core offering, except they had a pattern and some simple small details that were inspired by Sandy Liang’s heritage and brand. The logistics of the drop weren’t the best either: it was sold out before the general launch time because of a massive early access list, possible tech issues, no purchase limit per person and maaaybe some bots. The aftermath was like nothing I’ve seen before: from the angry comments and TikToks flooding my fyp to Baggu posting a public statement and offering pre-order for a restock of the drop items.
Why, despite the drop’s unoriginality, was it so popular? Why issue a public statement with apologies for running out of what was clearly advertised as a limited drop? Why restock? And most importantly, why were people this mad about not being able to get it? These questions have been circling in my head for months. But the drop model as a mechanism that touches literally every aspect of business - from marketing to inventory management - is something that has fascinated me for years as I watched not only its rapid adoption by larger brands but its ability to power whole new companies in various industries all by itself. Yet, as the business and marketing girlie part of me grew more curious, the twenty-year-old who wants to be cool and different part of me grew more frustrated. At some point, I found myself unable to buy some basic white tees and underwear from Skims (which operates exclusively on drops) for an upcoming trip because everything good on Kim’s website is always sold out unless you shop on a drop day. “Why is everything a fucking drop now?” I asked myself, rolling my eyes at the very system I admire and contribute to during my day job.
The origin story and the state of the modern collab
A quick Google search will tell you that the invention of the drop culture is largely attributed to Supreme and its founder James Jebbia. Since 2013, like everyone else in fashion, they released two collections per year. Except Supreme would debut the entirety of the collection in advance and then break it down into weekly drops that occurred over the course of a few months. When interviewed, James Jebbia says that he never intended for people to feel like Supreme is this “tricky, hard-to-get brand”. The weekly drops didn’t originate as a brand and marketing strategy that created hype but were instead born out of necessity because the store had a hard time keeping product on their shelves: “We'd actually have some seasons where we were sold out of the summer product at the end of March. We'd have nothing to sell in April, May, June, July. People would come in and be like, ‘This shop is shit. Why are people talking about this?’ And what are we gonna say? ‘If you'd have come in two weeks ago, it looked really good’?” While I do believe in the innocent origin story, I think Supreme pretty quickly understood that being a hard-to-get brand, the drops, and exclusivity benefited both the company and the brand immensely - otherwise, they wouldn’t keep doing it in 2023.
And so did many more businesses, because slowly but surely, the original concept of the drop grew into the monster that drop culture is today. Drops put legacy brands in front of young cool audiences of small brands, energized marketing teams and took the pressure off of product teams and young founders. Today, it’s hard to even pinpoint what exactly a drop is. You’ve got a Glossier drop - when a company that specializes in beauty releases a limited run of a product in a different category that carries the company’s brand, like this cute seasonal this tumbler that’s already sold out (although, you could argue that at this point, “goods” is one of Glossier’s permanent categories). Then you’ve got drops, like Rhode’s peptide lip treatment in strawberry glaze, when a company releases some stock of a product they make anyways in a different flavor or pattern. There are drops that are collaborations between brands, like Sandy Liang x Salomon or New Balance x Aime Leon Dore. There are Skims drops that are pretty much a product testing windmill and an always-on PR machine. You have companies, like MSCHF, who release wild card drops instead of creating any sort of core product. And of course there are drops from small businesses that can only make small batches of product and are able to sell them though social media and online stores. And then there are also drops that are just product releases and shouldn’t be called drops at all.
Are drops for everyone?
Besides giving us the drop, streetwear also birthed the hypebeast - a person who moves at the speed of the trend cycle and chases brands with the most hype around them. While their basic classmates hung out at the mall and shopped Abecrombie, they hung out in the line to Supreme’s store. To them, the rarity of the item made it all more valuable because it made them stand out, but even if they didn’t get it, they were still the type of person who knew about the rare item, and that had enough signaling power in itself. When I think about the kind of people who shopped Baggu on a regular day today, I can’t think of a person that’s more polar opposite of the person who bought Supreme in 2016. These people shop to fit in. They see a cute bag on someone else and they want that bag. It just so happens that a million more people see the same bag on TikTok and IG ads. To them - the hunt for rarity is stressful and discouraging.
I don’t think that alone is enough to explain the frustration and rage that filled Baggu’s comment section following the drop though. There is another layer to today’s drop culture and consumerism which someone online called the “what about me effect.” With drops from ultra luxury brands, there is a mutual understanding that they are not for everyone because luxury brands aren’t for everyone to begin with. But with more accessible brands, especially the ones that grew exponentially via the internet, that understanding isn’t there. In fact, when a brand grows mostly via social media, ads and organic recommendations, people feel the same amount of ownership of the brand’s success as they do of the success of the influencers that they “made famous.” The same people who think they made Emma Chamberlain and Alix Earle famous are the same people who think they made Baggu happen. They are upset when influencers change creative direction because it no longer caters to them even though they supported them early on, and they are upset when their favorite brands grow and no longer cater specifically to the community they started with. It seems to be hard for a good number of people within this young and online generation of consumers to grapple with the fact that even though their For You Pages continuously cater to their unique and changing interests, brands and entertainers don’t have to.
The compounding drop effect
Shopping drops is very much a choice, even now. But what happens if literally everything becomes a drop? The final stage of capitalism where everything in everyone’s life and schedule revolves around the goods we buy. It sounds utopian but it’s actually not that hard to imagine because that’s what living in a major coastal city, like New York, already looks like for many people. When you live in a city like New York where a lot of cool new things are made, sold, and happening, it’s easy to feel bummed out if you are buying or doing something mediocre. If you are genuinely a nerd about certain things, like coffee, clothes or home decor, or a good chunk of your self-worth replies on how many people ask you questions about what you are wearing, eating, and doing in your free time, you’ve got to make moves, plan ahead and get uncomfortable because there are a lot of other people who want the good and rare things too. The New York experience starts with hunting for a decent apartment at a decent price (the most important drop of all) and ends with shopping for a batch of biscuits on IG. You can never get complacent either because odds are, your landlord is going to raise your rent, the small baker is going to change the butter they use to raise the margins and someone will post about your quiet little coffee shop in Ridgewood on TikTok.
Another image of what an “everything is a drop” world could look like that leans more into treating everything as a rare investment rather than genuinely enjoying the quality of well-made limited stock things (and/or the street cred that come with them), is the state of mainstream crypto at its peak in 2021-2022. The smaller the supply and the larger the hype around the NFT drop are, the higher the resell prices are and the more interest there is around finding drops with high potential. We all know what a shit show it became once everyone and their mother wanted to buy in and how badly it ended for a lot of people. Maybe it was the financial market and not Supreme, who pioneered the drop culture after all.
Drop culture is exciting. It’s a smart way to reposition an underwear brand as a loungewear innovation lab and a French bakery as an events and brand marketing hub. At some point though, the innovation goes so far that it brings us back full circle. I was trying to imagine the wildest developments of the culture drop for this piece, like a content drop that’s only available to the fist 250 readers or a music drop that only the most devoted fans get to listen to, and had to chuckle at myself because that’s literally a print newspaper and a live concert. I am all here for the smart ways to build and grow business but maybe it’s just about time we drop calling it “the drop” as to not piss off the people shopping it.
Right when I finished wiring this, Baggu dropped the news about a restock and a new item for their Sandy Liang collab! Spooky!
