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A catalogue of records came before the clothing label. Desto Dubb came up in Watts, in South Los Angeles, and 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 cough syrup streetwear merch arrived in early October 2016. More about the brand is explained by that date than by the founding mythology, because it fixes the music as the earlier of his two careers. While 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. Because they were written by someone who writes track titles, the graphics read like track titles.
Inside the Los Angeles rap scene rather than beside it is where his recorded work locates him. On the track “Bankteller” he has recorded with Lil Uzi Vert, Lil Pump, Smokepurpp and 03 Greedo, a line-up spanning West Coast street rap and the SoundCloud generation. More recently, “Dead Homies” featuring Veeze is listed 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 gives the same loose treatment to a handful of his other releases, with tracks promoted to albums by writers working from press kits. It takes a minute to check a release on the platform before naming it, and it avoids repeating an error that has now travelled a long way. Alongside the business the music is still active, and that is not the usual arrangement for a founder running three storefronts.
That’s A Awful Lot Of Cough Syrup, as the company is now known, started in 2018. Two records point at that year: the trademark for the phrase lists first use in November 2018, and an AllHipHop profile from November 2023 describes the brand marking five years. Its own about page says the selling began out of a van in a parking lot in downtown Los Angeles. Later coverage sometimes places the van during the pandemic, but where accounts conflict the trademark filing and the anniversary piece are firmer. The method is not in dispute: stock in a vehicle, buyers in person, no wholesale accounts and no season calendar. That approach still governs the business, and small batches land every week or two rather than twice a year.
The name came before the company did. It comes from a viral clip 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 interesting part 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 turned the wordmark itself into the product. The searcher spelling thats an awful lot of cough syrup is what most people type, although the registered mark uses “A” rather than “An”.
The Melrose flagship at 7669 Melrose Avenue shows the distance travelled from the van more clearly than anything else. Desto Dubb has used the street number as his own social media display name, which tells you how much of the brand is bound up in one address. Two more locations are listed, at 312 West 5th Street in Los Angeles and 5410 Almeda Road in Houston, although the company publishes no store locator and no opening hours. Running alongside them is its own online store, where the catalogue sits at roughly 154 products and refreshes constantly. Product copy says the garments are made in Los Angeles, and describes the company 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.
March 2024, when the brand partnered with Rolling Loud California from the 14th to the 17th at Hollywood Park in Inglewood, brought the most visible expansion. What went up 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 month around it was packed, since a 310babii collaboration was announced on March 11, a Got Sole pop-up followed on March 19, and a Dodger Collection arrived on March 29. Earlier, 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 than 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.
Two different legal identities come back when you search his name, and that is a problem worth handling carefully rather than repeating. The documentary record supports one of them: 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 say the same thing, one filed with a federal agency and one published by the business itself. The other circulating name turns up on an unsourced commercial content site with nothing behind it, and it should not be repeated as fact. In practice this matters little to a reader, because the brand, its collaborators and its stores use one name. He is Desto Dubb, the name his own company uses for him.
Built from dated coverage, the trademark record and the brand’s own posts, the timeline below leaves out anything that could not be pinned to a date. Read it in order, because the sequence is the argument: music, then phrase, then storefronts, then festival-scale activations. Note 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 involving prices or catalogue size was accurate in September 2026 and will drift. Store opening dates are absent, because the company has never published them.
| The date | Entry |
|---|---|
| Early October 2016 | Release of the EP Born to Sale Juice |
| March 18, 2017 | XXL runs a piece on Desto Dubb and the EP |
| 2018 | The clothing starts selling out of a van in a downtown Los Angeles parking lot |
| November 2018 | First use of the phrase that was trademarked, as listed in the US trademark record |
| April 8, 2023 | The Cookies collaboration with Berner launches |
| April 28, 2023 | The BlueBucksClan drop “That’s A Awful Lot of Legendary” in tribute to Drakeo The Ruler |
| 2023 | Brand makes its debut at New York and Los Angeles Fashion Weeks |
| November 10, 2023 | An AllHipHop profile marks the brand’s fifth anniversary |
| March 11, 2024 | Announcement of the 310babii collaboration |
| March 14 to 17, 2024 | Partnership with Rolling Loud California, Hollywood Park, Inglewood |
| March 19, 2024 | Got Sole pop-up held in Los Angeles |
| March 29, 2024 | The Dodger Collection is released |
| April 2024 | Trapstar publishes the Trapstar London collaboration |
| September 2026 | Catalogue around 154 products; tees about $150, hoodies about $200 |
The circulating online version of this career is tidier than the evidence supports, and the tidying mostly runs in the brand’s favour. A staged or unstaged clip becomes a documented arrest; singles become albums; a handful of unsourced celebrity sightings become a client list. None of that is needed, because 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 survive are the trademark, the dated collaborations, the addresses and the prices. The parts that do not hold up 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.