Act one: the rapper arrived first
Before there was a clothing label, there was a catalogue of records. Desto Dubb grew up in Watts, in South Los Angeles, and was working as a rapper well before anyone printed his phrase on a hoodie. XXL wrote him up on March 18, 2017, writing about his EP Born to Sale Juice, alocs shorts drop which had arrived in early October 2016. That date says more about the brand than the founding mythology does, since it establishes 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 records themselves
His recorded work places him inside the Los Angeles rap scene rather than beside it. 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, 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 lands on a handful of his other releases in press coverage, with tracks promoted to albums by writers working from press kits. The music continues alongside the business, which is not the usual arrangement for a founder running three storefronts. Checking a release on the platform before naming it is a minute’s work and avoids repeating an error that has now travelled a long way.
Act two: a van, a parking lot and a phrase
The company that now trades as That’s A Awful Lot Of Cough Syrup 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. Some later coverage places the van during the pandemic, and where accounts conflict the trademark filing and the anniversary piece are firmer. The part that is not in dispute is the method: 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 came before the company did. 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 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 !”. 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 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 shape of the business in 2026
The clearest measure of the distance travelled from the van is the Melrose flagship at 7669 Melrose Avenue. The street number has served as Desto Dubb’s own social media display name, which tells you how much of the brand is bound up in one address. Listed alongside it are two further locations, 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. Its own online store runs alongside them, with a catalogue that sits at roughly 154 products and refreshes constantly. Prices hold steady at the upper end of independent streetwear: 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. 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 one 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. 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 surrounding month was busy, 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. 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. That drop 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 launched earlier the same month, and Trapstar London published a joint piece through its own accounts in April 2024.
A note on which 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 name that circulates 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.
A 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. Read it in order, because 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 involving prices or catalogue size was accurate in September 2026 and will drift. Dates for store openings are absent because the company has never published them.
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| Early October 2016 | EP Born to Sale Juice arrives |
| March 18, 2017 | XXL profiles 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 recorded in the US trademark record |
| April 8, 2023 | Cookies collaboration with Berner launches |
| April 28, 2023 | BlueBucksClan release “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 | The 310babii collaboration is announced |
| March 14 to 17, 2024 | The Rolling Loud California partnership, Hollywood Park, Inglewood |
| March 19, 2024 | The Got Sole pop-up in Los Angeles |
| March 29, 2024 | Release of the Dodger Collection |
| April 2024 | The Trapstar London collaboration is published by Trapstar |
| September 2026 | Catalogue at around 154 products; tees about $150, hoodies about $200 |
Reading the record straight
What circulates online about this career 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, given that 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 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. Anyone writing about awful lot of cough syrup is better off with the first list, which is long enough on its own.
