Act one: first came the rapper
A catalogue of records predates the clothing 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. XXL wrote him up on March 18, 2017, writing about his EP Born to Sale Juice, which https://awfullottacoughsyrup.com/product-category/t-shirts/ had arrived in early October 2016. That date tells you more about the brand than the founding mythology does, since it establishes the music as the earlier of his two careers. The graphics read like track titles because they were written by someone who writes 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.
What is on the board
His recorded work sets 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. “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. A handful of his other releases get the same loose treatment in press coverage, 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 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, a phrase
That’s A Awful Lot Of Cough Syrup, as the company is now known, started in 2018. Two records pin down 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 sets the start of selling 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 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.
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 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 huge, and turned the wordmark itself into 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. 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. 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. Running alongside them is its own online store, where the catalogue 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. Product copy states the garments are made in Los Angeles and describes the company as a Black-owned business.
Festivals, collaborations and one tribute
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. The activation was not a merch booth but a carnival, built around 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, on April 28, 2023, the label put out “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 the name to use
Searching his name throws up two different legal identities, which is a problem worth handling carefully rather than repeating. Only one of them has 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. That 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, and his own company refers to him that way.
Timeline of the career
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. Reading it in order pays, since 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 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. Anything here touching prices or catalogue size was accurate in September 2026 and will drift. Dates for the store openings are missing, since the company has never published them.
| Date on record | Event |
|---|---|
| Early October 2016 | Release of the EP Born to Sale Juice |
| March 18, 2017 | XXL profiles Desto Dubb and the EP |
| 2018 | Selling of the clothing starts from a van in a downtown Los Angeles parking lot |
| November 2018 | The trademarked phrase is first used, as recorded in 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” honouring Drakeo The Ruler |
| 2023 | The brand debuts at New York and Los Angeles Fashion Weeks |
| November 10, 2023 | AllHipHop profile records the brand’s fifth anniversary |
| March 11, 2024 | 310babii collaboration made public |
| March 14 to 17, 2024 | The tie-up with Rolling Loud California, Hollywood Park, Inglewood |
| March 19, 2024 | The Got Sole pop-up in Los Angeles |
| March 29, 2024 | Dodger Collection arrives |
| April 2024 | Trapstar London collaboration, published by Trapstar |
| September 2026 | Catalogue around 154 products; 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 embroidery 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 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.