ALOCS Shorts Owner Review Design and Details

Act one: first came the rapper

Before there was a clothing label, there was a catalogue of records. Desto Dubb, who grew up in Watts, in South Los Angeles, was working as a rapper well before anyone printed his phrase on Awfullottacoughsyrup a hoodie. The XXL write-up landed 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, because it fixes the music as the earlier of his two careers. The graphics read like track titles, which they do because someone who writes track titles wrote them. 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.

The recorded work on the board

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. Inside the Los Angeles rap scene rather than beside it is where his recorded work locates him. More recently «Dead Homies» featuring Veeze appears on streaming services as a single, and that distinction is worth keeping straight, since several write-ups describe it as an album when the streaming listing does not. The same loose treatment is given to a handful of his other releases in press coverage, with tracks promoted to albums by writers working from press kits. Checking a release on the platform before naming it takes a minute and avoids repeating an error that has now travelled a long way. The music is still active alongside the business, which is not the usual arrangement for a founder running three storefronts.

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

What is now That’s A Awful Lot Of Cough Syrup started in 2018. That year is supported 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. The van is put during the pandemic by some later coverage, and 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 continues to shape the business, with small batches landing every week or two rather than twice a year.

The name arrived 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 refers to 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 !». What Desto Dubb did with the line is the interesting part, since 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: the business in 2026

Nothing measures the distance travelled from the van more clearly than the Melrose flagship at 7669 Melrose Avenue. 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 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. The price level remains at the upper end of independent streetwear, with a tee about $150 at the brand’s own store as of September 2026, hoodies and sweatpants about $200 each, and those figures moving with stock and season. 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.

Festivals, collaborations and a tribute drop

The most visible expansion 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 amounted to a carnival, not a merch booth, 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 dense, 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. 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 than like a neighbourhood gesture, which is roughly how the brand has handled its music-world ties throughout. A separate collaboration with Berner’s Cookies had gone live earlier the same month, and Trapstar London published a joint piece through its own accounts in April 2024.

A note on the name to use

Search his name and two different legal identities come back, which is a problem worth handling carefully rather than repeating. Only one of them carries documentary support: 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. Those are two separate records agreeing, one filed with a federal agency and one published by the business itself. The other circulating name 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, the name his own company uses for him.

Timeline of the career

The timeline below draws on 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 helps, since 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. Dates for the store openings are missing, since the company has never published them.

Reading the story straight

The version of this career that circulates 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 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 trademark, the dated collaborations, the addresses and the prices are the parts that hold up. 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.