023: The New Drop: From Streetwear to Seeds, Urns and Cookies

DK WOON

— 5 min read
023: The New Drop: From Streetwear to Seeds, Urns and Cookies

By now everyone and their grandma knows what a 'Drop' is. We've previously done a mini-history of the drop in a streetwear context. Generally people instinctively associate the Drop with an otaku manner of consumption. Camping in queues for trainers and the like. But in recent years, the drop model has been finding new leases of life away from the Supremes, Palaces and Corteizs of the world, in categories distant from streetwear (don't worry we're not going to bore you with NFTs).

In its fresh iterations, the Drop is not just for otakus, something we were reminded of when reading this edition of Kyle Chayka's excellent newsletter 'One Thing'.

The New Drops

We've collated four examples of what we mean below. We think these examples are interesting as they illustrate why Drops are still so relevant:

- Scarcity is not always about 'limited edition', there's other ways it can be achieved
- Drops are about training customers so they anticipate them
- Drops can be either singular products or collections
- There's a breadth of customers that can be reached through Drops
- There's so much power in repetition and creating variations on a theme

Small Batch Seeds

Seeds?!! It's a far way from streetwear. We've been intrigued about Row7 for quite some time, as it leans heavily into breeding for flavour. Dan Barber generally does some interesting stuff. #SeedHaul

Companies Row7 | Floret Farm | Second Generation Seeds | Experimental Farm Network
Scarcity Models Early-Stage Innovation | Scarce Raw Materials | Handcrafted Goods
Who's Buying People with 'back-to-the-land' hobbies or career switches. The strategist turned ceramicist pipeline.
The Drop The season's latest seed, which is either being carefully bred, or from small family farms with a focus on quality.
Cadence Arrives in your inbox or via Instagram. Seed heads are a small community so it's easy to drive hype. Follows both the rhythm of either product development, and the planting calendar

Sourced Vintage Homewares

Olive Ateliers draws lines around the block in the LA heat for their releases of terracota urns, distressed wooden furniture and wonky blown glass vases. They've managed to build a killer hype model, that leans on learnings from Supreme but is not about 'limited edition'.

Companies Olive Ateliers | Lone Fox Home | Elsie Green
Scarcity Model Discontinued Products | Vintage Items with Cultural Value
Who's Buying Kim Kardashian, Elsa Hosk et al shop at Olive Ateliers. Kendall Jenner's just done a collab with them.
The Drop Vintage homewares which they scour the world to source, which are then handily brought back to LA and displayed for you.
Cadence Online and in-person. Drops are announced via Instagram, email, text message, and our website. Once they're gone they're gone. Releases are weekly, and the shop is only open Weds-Sat. In the time in between, the shop is remerchandised.

Hype Luxury Cookies

Cookies variety used to be chocolate chip, oatmeal and raisin, sugar, peanut butter and not much more. There's a new breed of cookie in town that's thoroughly indulgent and priced accordingly.

Companies Crumbl | Last Crumb | Chip City
Scarcity Model Manufactured Scarcity | Artisanal Scarcity
Who's Buying People who film reaction videos on TikTok. Conspicuous consumers, who are drawn by the high price tags. Generally, it skews female and Gen-Z / Millenial.
The Drop On Crumbl it's always six new cookies, often themed around yearly markers - e.g. Mother's Day.
Cadence The menu rotates weekly, with all six items changing Releases are teased out on all their socials (they're everywhere IG, TikTok, Youtube, X).

Not Yet Industrialised Apparel

Brands that are experimenting with materials and innovative manufacturing often release prototypes to the public in small numbers. These experimental Doing this consistently creates a constant narrative of progress and testing. They create waitlists for their product.

Companies Vollebak | Nike ISPA | Stone Island Prototype Research | Outlier
Scarcity Model Prototype or Experimental Goods | Early-Stage Innovation | Technologically Sophisticated Manufacturing | Advanced Materials and Construction
Who's Buying Tends to be a bit dude-centric, but notably different to streetwear. More misanthropic. dude-centric
The Drop Generally the drops will be collections themed around a particular innovation, whether that is a material (e.g. Dyneema) or a manufacturing technique (e.g. glueless).
Cadence Less frequent, but the consumer has high-interest so is often signed up via mailing lists etc. Normally done online rather than in-person. Members usually get early access.

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