Act one: the rapper came first
A catalogue of records existed before the clothing label. Desto Dubb, who grew up in Watts, in South Los Angeles, 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. 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 awfullottacoughsyrup.com/product-category/t-shirts 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.
The records on the board
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. Inside the Los Angeles rap scene rather than beside it is where his recorded work places him. “Dead Homies” featuring Veeze is listed 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. Press coverage hands the same loose treatment to a handful of his other releases, with tracks promoted to albums by writers working from press kits. 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. The music remains live 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. That year is indicated 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. According to its own about page, the selling began out of a van in a parking lot in downtown Los Angeles. Some later coverage dates the van to the pandemic, and where accounts conflict the trademark filing and the anniversary piece are firmer. What is not in dispute is the method: stock in a vehicle, buyers in person, no wholesale accounts and no season calendar. That approach still shapes the business, with small batches landing every week or two rather than twice a year.
Before the company existed, the name did. It traces back to 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 !”. The part worth noticing 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 huge, and turned the wordmark itself into 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: where the business stands in 2026
Nothing measures the distance travelled from the van more clearly than the Melrose flagship at 7669 Melrose Avenue. 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. 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. 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. 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
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. 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. That month was packed: 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. 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 the name to use
Searching his name throws up two different legal identities, which is a problem worth handling carefully rather than repeating. One of them is borne out by the documentary record: 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. That is two separate records agreeing, one filed with a federal agency and one published by the business itself. An unsourced commercial content site with nothing behind it is where the other circulating name appears, 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, and his own company refers to him that way.
The 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. It is worth reading in order, because the sequence is the argument: music, then phrase, then storefronts, then festival-scale activations. Note the tight cluster around March 2024, with four separate events in nineteen days. Note too the twenty months separating the first XXL coverage from 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. Whatever here involves prices or catalogue size was accurate in September 2026 and will drift.
| The date | The event |
|---|---|
| Early October 2016 | EP Born to Sale Juice arrives |
| March 18, 2017 | XXL covers Desto Dubb and the EP |
| 2018 | Clothing starts selling from a van in a downtown Los Angeles parking lot |
| November 2018 | First use of the phrase that was trademarked, per the US trademark record |
| April 8, 2023 | Cookies collaboration with Berner goes live |
| April 28, 2023 | The BlueBucksClan collaboration “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 notes the brand’s fifth anniversary |
| March 11, 2024 | 310babii collaboration announced |
| March 14 to 17, 2024 | The tie-up with Rolling Loud California, Hollywood Park, Inglewood |
| March 19, 2024 | A Got Sole pop-up in Los Angeles |
| March 29, 2024 | The Dodger Collection drops |
| 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
What circulates online about 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 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.