Act one: the rapper came before the label
Before there was a clothing label, there was a catalogue of records. Watts, in South Los Angeles, is where Desto Dubb grew up, and he was working as a rapper well before anyone printed his phrase on a hoodie. The XXL piece 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 establishes the music as the earlier of his two careers. The graphics read like track titles, which they do alocs shorts 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 is visible in how the company later behaved.
What is on the board
His recorded work places him inside the Los Angeles rap scene, rather than beside it. The track “Bankteller” has him alongside Lil Uzi Vert, Lil Pump, Smokepurpp and 03 Greedo, a line-up spanning West Coast street rap and the SoundCloud generation. “Dead Homies” featuring Veeze appears on streaming services as a single, which is a distinction worth keeping straight, because several write-ups describe it as an album when the streaming listing does not. The same loose treatment lands on a handful of his other releases in press coverage, with tracks promoted to albums by writers working from press kits. It is the work of 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. The music is still active 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
The company now known as That’s A Awful Lot Of Cough Syrup started in 2018. Two separate records back 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. According to its own about page, the selling began out of a van in a parking lot in downtown Los Angeles. Later coverage sometimes puts 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 drives the business, and small batches land every week or two rather than twice a year.
The name was there before the company was. It originates in 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 points at 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 he 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 trademarked the phrase, printed it large, and made the wordmark itself the product. Most people type the searcher spelling thats an awful lot of cough syrup, but the registered mark uses “A” rather than “An”.
Act three: the business in 2026
The Melrose flagship at 7669 Melrose Avenue registers the distance travelled from the van more clearly than anything else. The street number has been used as Desto Dubb’s own social media display name, which tells you 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. 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. Running alongside them is its own online store, where the catalogue sits at roughly 154 products and refreshes constantly. The product copy states the garments are made in Los Angeles and describes the company as a Black-owned business.
Festivals, collaborations, and a tribute
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. 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 still, on April 28, 2023, came “That’s A Awful Lot of Legendary” with BlueBucksClan at the Melrose store, a limited drop honouring the late Drakeo The Ruler. Less marketing than neighbourhood gesture, that one is roughly how the brand has handled its music-world ties throughout. A separate collaboration with Berner’s Cookies had launched 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. 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. What you have there is two separate records agreeing, 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 this matters little to a reader, because the brand, its collaborators and its stores use one name. He is Desto Dubb, which is how his own company refers to him.
A career timeline
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 gap of 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. Store opening dates are absent, because the company has never published them. Anything here covering prices or catalogue size was accurate in September 2026 and will drift.
| The date | Event |
|---|---|
| Early October 2016 | Release of the EP Born to Sale Juice |
| March 18, 2017 | Coverage of Desto Dubb and the EP in XXL |
| 2018 | The clothing starts selling out of a van in a downtown Los Angeles parking lot |
| November 2018 | The trademarked phrase is first used, according to the US trademark record |
| April 8, 2023 | Launch of the Cookies collaboration with Berner |
| April 28, 2023 | A BlueBucksClan drop “That’s A Awful Lot of Legendary” paying tribute to Drakeo The Ruler |
| 2023 | The brand debuts at New York and Los Angeles Fashion Weeks |
| November 10, 2023 | AllHipHop profile marks the brand’s fifth anniversary |
| March 11, 2024 | 310babii collaboration announced |
| March 14 to 17, 2024 | Rolling Loud California tie-up, Hollywood Park, Inglewood |
| March 19, 2024 | Got Sole pop-up held in Los Angeles |
| March 29, 2024 | Dodger Collection arrives |
| April 2024 | Trapstar London collaboration published by Trapstar |
| September 2026 | Around 154 products in the catalogue; tees about $150, hoodies about $200 |
Getting the story straight
The circulating online version of this career is tidier than the evidence supports, and the tidying mostly runs in the brand’s favour. A clip that may or may not have been staged 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 hold up are these: the trademark, the dated collaborations, the addresses and the prices. The ones that do not are the origin anecdote in its confident form and the roll-call of famous wearers. The first list serves anyone writing about awful lot of cough syrup better, and it is long enough on its own.