Act one: the rapper came before the label
Desto Dubb, who was raised in Watts, in South Los Angeles, was working as a rapper well before anyone printed his phrase on a hoodie. A catalogue of records predates the clothing label. XXL wrote him up 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. 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 shorts collection someone who writes track titles, the graphics read like track titles.
The recorded work on the board
His recorded work locates him inside the Los Angeles rap scene, rather than beside it. The track “Bankteller” puts him beside 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. The same loose treatment befalls 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 costs 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 one phrase
The company now known as That’s A Awful Lot Of Cough Syrup started in 2018. Two records point at that year, since 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 puts the van in the pandemic, 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. The business is still shaped by that approach, with small batches landing every week or two rather than twice a year.
Before the company existed, the name 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. Most people type the searcher spelling thats an awful lot of cough syrup, but the registered mark uses “A” rather than “An”.
Act three: where the business stands in 2026
The Melrose flagship at 7669 Melrose Avenue shows the distance travelled from the van more clearly than anything else. That street number has been 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. 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 drop
The biggest expansion in visibility came in March 2024, when the brand partnered with Rolling Loud California from the 14th to the 17th at Hollywood Park in Inglewood. The activation was not a merch booth but a carnival, featuring 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. 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 drop 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.
A note on what to call him
Search his name and two different legal identities come back, 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. 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 the question 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.
The career timeline
The timeline below rests 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 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. Dates for store openings are absent because the company has never published them. Whatever here involves prices or catalogue size was accurate in September 2026 and will drift.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| Early October 2016 | Release of the EP Born to Sale Juice |
| March 18, 2017 | XXL profiles Desto Dubb and the EP |
| 2018 | Clothing goes on sale from a van in a downtown Los Angeles parking lot |
| November 2018 | Earliest use of the trademarked phrase, as listed in the US trademark record |
| April 8, 2023 | Launch of the Cookies collaboration with Berner |
| April 28, 2023 | The BlueBucksClan drop “That’s A Awful Lot of Legendary” in honour of Drakeo The Ruler |
| 2023 | Brand debuts at New York and Los Angeles Fashion Weeks |
| November 10, 2023 | AllHipHop profile records the brand’s fifth anniversary |
| March 11, 2024 | Announcement of the 310babii collaboration |
| March 14 to 17, 2024 | Rolling Loud California partnership, Hollywood Park, Inglewood |
| March 19, 2024 | A Got Sole pop-up in Los Angeles |
| March 29, 2024 | Release of the Dodger Collection |
| April 2024 | Trapstar London collaboration put out by Trapstar |
| September 2026 | The catalogue runs to around 154 products; tees about $150, hoodies about $200 |
Reading the record 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 it is needed, since 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 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 served by the first list, which is long enough on its own.