\u201cSupply Co. began as a small line of merch for employees and almost immediately blew up. OpenAI-ers developed concerningly strong, excited opinions about collectible cards, blue folding chairs, and graphic hoodies as emerging currency,\u201d reads Supply Co.\u2019s About page. \u201cSomewhere along our timeline, these objects evolved from being just \u2018merch\u2019 into material embodiments of company culture. The next phase of Supply Co. is much bigger than seasonal drops: it\u2019s collaborations, experiments, and physical expressions of research energy.\u201d This includes apparel, a \u201cBloop\u201d tote, water bottles, socks, and an already out-of-stock basketball.<\/p>\n
It is interesting that now is the time these once-cloaked titans of tech are seeking to telegraph taste and cultural relevancy through promotional garments. It\u2019s a strategy, as much as their playbooks for political influence and claims on what the future looks like. Merch has served as a way to make power feel desirable, familiar, wearable. No shares, but how about a hoodie? Yet for companies supposedly engineering tomorrow, their aesthetic lexicon is surprisingly familiar: streetwear, workwear, old-school Americana.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe color choices remind me massively of the early Outdoor Voices colour scheme. The whole get outside, \u2018Doing Things\u2019 aesthetic,\u201d says Louis Cheslaw, editor and writer of the style Substack Wardrobe<\/a>, \u201cwhich tracks with how all the AI companies\u2019s commercials are about people using the software while doing IRL activities. It\u2019s a nice idea, but the awkward Meta AI glasses rollout shows how far there is to go there.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019d laugh if the amount of ugly new product being put into the world wasn\u2019t so wasteful,\u201d Cheslaw adds.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s ALD-coded [Aim\u00e9 Leon Dore-coded] because that style of lookbook was widely adopted by brands at every price point,\u201d says Chris Black, co-host of How Long Gone and founder of consultancy Done to Death Projects<\/a>; he\u2019s worked with brands from Thom Browne to New Balance and J.Crew. \u201cThe AI guys were getting rich and discovering fashion, so they think this is what it should look like. It\u2019s easy to understand and easy to execute.\u201d It\u2019s all a reflection of how streetwear has much less to do with the \u201cstreet\u201d now than what\u2019s percolating on Sand Hill Road, at the Sweetgreens around FiDi, and in LinkedIn comments.<\/p>\n Indeed, today\u2019s tech bro uniform is part of a longer corporate lineage. Tony Wang<\/a>, founder of Office of Applied Strategy<\/a> (a hybrid consulting firm, think tank, and venture fund), has spent years researching corporate aesthetics, tracing how companies use objects\u2014from jackets to tote bags, and desk accessories\u2014to project a worldview beyond the confines of a simple brand, and what merch ventures like this could say about the wider market.<\/p>\n For Wang, the idea that corporate merchandise should aspire to be desirable isn\u2019t new. Throughout the 1980s and \u201990s, Wall Street\u2019s biggest players produced an entire ecosystem of lifestyle goods for their employees: Goldman Sachs-branded L.L.Bean totes, desk clocks, picnic sets, and country-club-ready accessories. The merchandise reflected the life the industry imagined for itself. \u201cMerch by finance firms catered to the finance class,\u201d Wang explains. \u201cObjects reflected their lifestyle aspirations\u2014lunch meetings at the club, yachting.\u201d<\/p>\n