okay today we're going to be talking about how Supreme built a $5 billion streetwear Empire with a marketing strategy that really nobody talks about I stole it I applied it to my clothing brand and now we're doing consistent six figure months and we're seeing numbers we've never seen before due to this change in the psychology of our marketing see when I first started my clothing brand I was lucky to make a couple hundred bucks on a good day I was hustling t-shirts out of my bedroom every single day wondering how the hell Brands like Supreme Cortez and broke Planet sell a t-shirt with a little simple box logo te for premium prices and then make millions off of so what I did what I think is required for anybody to become one of the best at something and I became obsessed I took Supreme and I studied every tiny little thing about them and not their box logos or collabs or anything but more so the psychological triggers that they've been using since 1994 to create insane demand and really just take the entire Street world at their fingertips and what I found pretty much changed everything about me as a brand owner and the future of my clothing brand in general see I'm just a regular dude from the swamps of Florida been trying to figure this [ __ ] out for years and I finally did through primarily trial and error and today I'm going to break down exactly how I did it and by the end of this video you'll understand what I like to call the scarcity blueprint which is the four-phase strategy that I stole from Supreme to create insane demand for pretty much any product that you want to sell and the great thing is it works whether you have 500 followers or 500,000 followers and it delivers results pretty damn fast I've done 50K in 5 minutes I've done 100K in 30 minutes I've done a lot of crazy numbers in a very short amount of time using this strategy so let's get into it all right so first we need to understand what makes Supreme's marketing strategy so powerful Supreme started as a tiny little skateboard shop in New York City in 1994 and at first they weren't really doing anything special they were just selling skateboards to locals but then their founder James jebbia discovered something that really nobody else was using or even aware of at the time and that's something called taste makers there people that you'll find in really any community and they're essentially just the high status people that everybody tries to copy within a certain Community for Supreme that was just the best skaters in New York and these weren't just random skaters all right these are guys that every single dude in the community looked up to and when these guys started rocking Supreme everybody else wanted it too see but here's where Supreme did something really genius when all the tast makers in the skater Community started wearing the clothes and the demand started going up instead of ramping up production and volume of units like most brands would they actually did the opposite they intentionally made less product than the people wanted and this created what psychologists call artificial scarcity when people can't get something easily they want it even more these lines became the norm for Supreme I mean people camping out for days just to get a t-shirt with a box logo on it not because the designs were revolutionary because they inherently weren't but because it was so hard to get and people wanted it that bad I realized that if I could apply the same psychology to my brand Target the right people and curate scarcity I could build the same demand at a smaller scale so that's exactly what I did all right and I call it the scarcity blueprint it's Supreme's Playbook with my own little twist to make it even better and it's four simple phases that turn regular drop days into soldout events so phase one the mystery first phase is all about creating mystery people want what they can't have that's what this phase covers for my 100K drop I started this phase exactly 21 days before the actual drop and timing matters here all right if you do it too long before the drop then people lose interest if you do it too short before the drop there's not enough space between the start and the end of the campaign to create the right Dynamic so instead of showing all the products right away you create a little te's I personally posted extreme close-ups I posted tag testings I posted fabric testings I posted interesting Creative Images that kind of alluded to the meaning of the drop just enough to create a curiosity Gap and get people thinking what what the hell is going on here what's coming I know something's coming so what is it so for example recently I posted a little piece of tape I held it up like this and it had our new tags printed on it it was the ink from the screen printer and in the background you could see that we were screen printing shirts right which tells the audience okay we've got something new here this looks like a tag I've never seen this before is he making new tags are the shirts going to look different is there going to be a different approach with garment construction with the actual product development what's going on here right and there was a lot of Engagement a lot of questions a lot of views views it was actually one of our most viewed stories we've ever posted on the page and that's because we created like this anticipation this like feeling of what's coming you know see because when your brain sees part of something but not the whole thing it becomes obsessed with filling the gaps right because our brains want to make sense of everything so our brains want to fill the gaps of all the little holes that we see in things that we're interested in it's like when somebody starts telling you a story and then stops halfway or like asks you a question like hey can I ask you a question and then says oh never mind right because your brain wants to know the other half so me I like to show a lot of behind the scenes content because it creates that Curiosity Gap it creates that feeling of like okay I see that he's creating here but I don't see the final product like what's coming I I'm not understanding this please help me understand this I post about the photo shoots I post about the development process I post about trials and tribulations that we experience on the way I post about small ones I post about changes that we make or people that we bring on to the team that make the brand A Better Business and this isn't just cool content it's perceived value see because whenever people see the craftsmanship going into making your products the perceived value in their head is automatically higher because they see that it was hard to make hard to obtain hard to get and when something is hard to get or it's hard to create it's automatically worth more it has more intrinsic value in people's head and that's because things that are hard to get are always more expensive right so if something was hard for you to make and you can show that it was difficult for you to make it justifies higher price points and it makes it more Val valuable in the customer's head Supreme does this by showcasing their luxury collaborations and I do this by showcasing the techniques time and effort that I put into the making of my products all right phase two so after you've created this mystery it's time to create some real buzz you need to really get your target audience talking about your drop and this is where I leveraged what Supreme understood from day one the power of getting your stuff on the right people so for my previous drops I was the sole external representation for my brand but what you'll see from me moving forward now that I have a big enough team and good enough operations to scale is identifying 5 to 10 to 15 to 20 micro influencers in my Niche these are going to be handpicked guys that really understand the aesthetic of my brand and embody that not massive celebrities I'm talking people with 30 50 60 100,000 followers who really understand my culture and who really fit that blueprint and who really have insane engagement within the communities that I want to reach so that's going to be the biker communities the communities the street wear communities the Motocross communities the skater communities all these guys those are my targets and I'm not just going to send them free stuff all right I'm going to create an experience they can't help but share each package is going to have handwritten notes specifically written to the influencer custom packaging that looked super dope on camera early access codes that they could share with their followers behind the scenes Polaroids from the design process and little gifts that really match the Brand's aesthetic you know stickers lighters keychains things like that and I've done this with a number of of other brands so I'm 99.999% sure that it's going to bring a lot of external traffic from these communities that we're targeting thus contributing to a lot more sales a lot more excitement and a lot more Community awareness of our brand and during this Buzz phase I also started dropping hints about how limited our quantities were right we only have 100 of this we only have 50 pieces of this right and this creates this massive feeling of fomo right a fear of missing out and people start worrying about missing out before the product is even available and your brain hates the feeling of Mis opportuni so it pushes you to take action right but all this filmo has to go somewhere right that's where this next phase comes in so that brings us to phase three and that's going to be Vault phase all right and the Vault phase is my digital version of Supreme's in store exclusivity so about 2 to 3 weeks before my drop they I lock my website with a password and our landing page our homepage is just replaced with one that says hey the site is closed and if you want access to our page whenever the drop goes live just put your phone number in here and we'll send you a text to confirm whenever the website opens so that you can get it and that way you can get what you want immediately before it sells out and this does three critical things all right number one it creates exclusivity all right because not everybody gets access number two it builds a direct marketing list with everybody that has interest in your product or thinks that they might want to buy it and that gives you the opportunity to communicate with every single person at one time instead of posting on social media and hoping that the algorithms favor you and show your product or show your post to as many people as possible and number three it helps you measure real real demand before ordering inventory so for example if you have a th000 signups it's safe to say that you can sell at least 5 to 10% of that which means you can probably sell 100 t-shirts and you also know that you're probably not going to sell 1,000 t-shirts so you don't order too much that way you're not left with a bunch of inventory on hand and you don't lose a bunch of money so by my last drop day I had just over 14,000 phone numbers and I'm not exactly sure how many emails but it's a lot and these weren't just random followers these were people who took action because they wanted first access and that's not the only benefit that they get from being on that list they also get a discount they also get exclusive updates they also get access to exclusive drops they also get access to exclusive password protected drops that are only for our SMS list and that's enough to incentivize people and that's enough giving to incentivize people to join your cult essentially and that's exactly how Supreme built this cult-like following they limit physical locations to only 15 storefronts worldwide they make customers register for spots in line and they control information about drops so tightly that you either feel like an Insider or an outsider and nobody wants to be an outsider and I've just adapted that approach for the digital age see the power of the Vault phase is that it creates a direct line from your product to your most interested customers completely bypassing algorithmic changes or platform issues you own this relationship all right and no social media algorithm can get in the way but it all means nothing if you can't convert all this attention into sales so pay attention to this last phase you'll learn a lot all right so phase four the frenzy this Final Phase is where all that builtup anticipation converts into sales so on drop day I send a very carefully timed sequence of messages right 48 hours I send out a text message it's saying something like hey the drop's coming up coming soon here's what's coming all right be there or miss out and then 24 hours before I'll kind of show what's dropping right and just say like hey this is coming in 24 hours if you are not there you will miss out sometimes I'll drop prices sometimes I won't it just depends and 3 hours before I'll send a quick text message showing like us preparing orders for the drop and then an hour before the drop sometimes I'll send an exclusive Early Access Link for our SMS members and then 2 minutes before drop time that's when we'll send our message saying hey our drop is Live come here's the website link and sometimes we'll have our page password protected and I'll send them a password to get in sometimes we'll open the site for everyone it really just depends on how much inventory we have to sell and when the site goes live sometimes we have upwards of like 2 3 4,000 people on the website at a time and some of the items sell out in literally seconds which creates this massive like feeling of missing out for everybody that's checking out because they're seeing things sell out they're like oh my gosh I need to buy right now and for me we've had entire collections of 1,000 2,000 3,000 plus unit drops sold out in minutes not days not hours I'm talking minutes and we've created hundreds of thousands of dollars in Revenue with this exact strategy now the key to the frenzy phase is really really really good communication and with Supreme they've spent decades building their reputation so they barely even have to announce that they have drops anymore for people to know but for newer Brands you need to be a lot more deliberate with your communication to provide a clear indication of what's available when it's available why it's not available currently when they'll be able to have it things like that so now I want to cover post drop psychology and here's where most brands completely miss the boat they think the strategy is done once their product is sold and supreme taught me why that logic is completely backwards actually matters most is what you offer when you sell out and this post strategy is exactly what Supreme did to build their $5 billion Empire see back in 2019 Supreme released their bandan box logo hoodie sold out in 16 seconds but what they did after they sold out was pure genius see they let their social channels fill up with comments of disappointed fans they highlighted resale prices of over $11,000 for their $168 hoodie and then they stayed completely silent about future releases for weeks see this psychological hack is called reward uncertainty and it's the same tactic the casinos use to keep you playing because when rewards become unpredictable we become obsessed with getting them and I saw this firsthand after our last drop I mean I had customers messaging me bro I tried to check out for 25 minutes and then it sold out next drop I'm going to set three alarms just so I can make sure that I get the product and that's the exact reaction that I wanted see like Supreme I don't just move on after the first drop right I spend weeks I strategically plan to build anticipation for the next drop using these three steps first I showcase the aftermath right I show the process of selling out I show the excitement from all the fans I show the behind the scenes of our packed shipping area I show comments from disappointed fans and second I reward my successful buyers with something more exclusive from my last jop I threw in random Overstock shirts from previous drops to random orders I included stickers things like that and third I drop a mysterious cryptic teaser for the next drop so that all the disappointed fans have something to look forward to and the post drop phase isn't about celebrating your win it's about using all that momentum to prepare for an even bigger drop next this is how Supreme built their empire and how I went from going to 5 10 15,000 drops to 100,000 drops in just 30 minutes so there you have it Supreme's $5 billion marketing strategy adapted for 2025 is digital age with my scarcity blueprint breaking it all down right what I Shar just scratches the very surface there's a whole system that goes behind successful clothing brands that goes way deeper than just the bare minimum marketing strategy there's a lot more that you need to know all right navigating production delays without killing your momentum handling unexpected competition and navigating drop dates from competing clothing brands Building Systems to scale beyond your bedroom operation actually making products that people want and are willing to buy building teams that make this process scalable and enjoyable there's a ton of material to cover and that's why I created a free master class for you guys to dive into to learn a bit more it's a complete 45 minute free course on YouTube that you guys can watch and that's where I break down my entire process from conceptualization of idea to to soldout drops and I dive into all the behind the-scenes stuff that nobody else really talks about and if you're serious about building a real clothing brain Empire that pulls in a ton of cash click on this video it'll be somewhere on the screen dive in grab a notebook and enjoy I'll see you over there