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Act one: the rapper arrived first

Before there was a clothing label, there was a catalogue of records. Watts, in South Los Angeles, is where Desto Dubb came up, and he 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, which had arrived in early October 2016. That date tells you more about the brand than the founding mythology does, since it fixes the music as the earlier of his logo tee 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 is visible in how the company later behaved.

The records on the board

His recorded work puts 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. Press coverage gives the same loose treatment to a handful of his other releases, 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 remains live 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

That’s A Awful Lot Of Cough Syrup, as the company is now known, 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. The company’s 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 still drives 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 !”. The interesting part 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 large, and made the wordmark itself the product. The searcher spelling thats an awful lot of cough syrup is what most people type, although 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 stay steady at the upper end of independent streetwear, since 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 declares the garments are made in Los Angeles, and describes the company as a Black-owned business.

Festivals, collaborations, and a tribute

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. 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 dense, 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 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 which name to use

Two different legal identities come back when you search his name, and that is a problem worth handling carefully rather than repeating. One of them is backed 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. 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. For a reader this matters little in practice, because the brand, its collaborators and its stores use one name. He is Desto Dubb, and his own company refers to him that way.

Timeline of the career

The timeline below is assembled 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. 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. Anything here touching 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.

The date	Entry
Early October 2016	EP Born to Sale Juice arrives
March 18, 2017	XXL runs a piece on Desto Dubb and the EP
2018	The clothing starts selling out of a van in a downtown Los Angeles parking lot
November 2018	First recorded use of the trademarked phrase, as listed in the US trademark record
April 8, 2023	Cookies collaboration with Berner goes live
April 28, 2023	The BlueBucksClan drop “That’s A Awful Lot of Legendary” in honour of Drakeo The Ruler
2023	The label 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 made public
March 14 to 17, 2024	The Rolling Loud California partnership, Hollywood Park, Inglewood
March 19, 2024	Got Sole pop-up in Los Angeles
March 29, 2024	Dodger Collection arrives
April 2024	The Trapstar London collaboration is published by Trapstar
September 2026	The catalogue runs to around 154 products; tees about $150, hoodies about $200

Reading the career 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 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. The first list serves anyone writing about awful lot of cough syrup better, and it is long enough on its own.