Early on a steamy June morning in Plantation, Florida, Matt Steiner sits working at his parents' ten-person dining room table. It's the start of the summer holidays, and he is joined by his friend Chris, who is home from his first year at university. Between yawns the two send tweets and check emails, but mostly they wait for 9.00am. That's when the pair will open access to their website for 60 minutes, just as they do every Thursday. During that hour, and that hour only, people can buy the use of Matt and Chris's web bot.
Finally the time comes. Within a minute, ten orders have rolled in. By 9.04, that number has doubled. People are browsing the site from the UK, South Korea and Hong Kong, looking at images of limited-edition products. If they're interested, they enter their address and payment information. If they want a hat, it'll cost $10 (£7.70). For a T-shirt it's $15. Hoodies are $20. To be clear, these aren't prices for the T-shirts, hats and hoodies; they're the prices would-be shoppers pay to have a chance of buying them when the clothing brand Supreme opens its own website and stores at 11am.
Almost 2,000 kilometres up the coast, in downtown Manhattan, people - mostly men - are lined up outside Supreme's New York City store for the same reason others are clicking on Matt and Chris's website: to get their hands on gear. On the Supreme subreddit, photos are filtering in from shoppers who have already got lucky in London and Paris, providing a valuable preview of what's to come.
At 9.55, Matt and Chris are closing in on 10,000 visitors to their site. The problem is, on this Thursday their customers aren't spending much money. Supreme releases only a handful of its seasonal collection each week, and this week's release isn't a great one. The pair were hoping that the long-promised Everlast boxing bag would come out today, or at least the $200 basketball, covered with butterflies and designed by skating legend Mark Gonzales. Instead, the core of the release is a series of T-shirts made in collaboration with a Jamaican musician from the 80s. Most "hypebeasts" - the largely teenage and twenty-something consumers who obsess over streetwear and trainer brands - are too young to know the dancehall stylings of Barrington Levy. By the time Matt and Chris shut down their site to finalise details before the Supreme release officially starts, they've topped out at 38 orders.
"All right, it's 10.59," Chris announces, hovering between his two computers. Matt stands behind him, phone in hand, watching over Chris's shoulder and nervously bouncing from foot to foot. At precisely 11.00, their bot connects to Supreme's servers, armed with all 38 customers' shopping lists and credit-card numbers, and efficiently completes the checkout process. It easily outpaces all the online shoppers who are patiently trying to click through Supreme's byzantine website, and typing in their billing information one keystroke at a time. It places the orders before everything sells out - which it almost always does.
Chris, who didn't want to reveal his last name, clicks over to a Gmail tab and checks his outbox. There are 38 newly sent messages, one automatically created for each potential customer whose order was filled. Completing them took 19 seconds.
Matt and Chris built their e-commerce bot in 2015, when they realised that their shared Supreme obsession was a business opportunity in disguise. The breakthrough came within a couple of months, when Supreme released a version of Nike's Air Jordan 5 trainers. The shoes were offered in three colour options, what trainer fans call colourways: white, black and desert camo. That day, Matt and Chris charged $100 for each pair a customer wanted to buy. One of the colours received around 200 orders, making the pair roughly $20,000 in five seconds. Chris and Matt won't say how much they make from their bot, the Supreme Saint, but they've formed a limited liability company.
If you have no idea why someone would pay $100 just to get a crack at spending another $200 on a pair of trainers, that's OK: Supreme isn't meant for you anyway. Since its launch in 1994, the company has turned conventional consumerism on its head and formed a cult-like fandom in the process. Its first store, still the flagship location, opened on the edge of Manhattan's SoHo neighbourhood back when the concept of streetwear was practically unheard of.
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Through the store's very design, founding owner James Jebbia communicated to the shopper that Supreme was a skate shop, one meant just for skaters, who would often loiter around all day. The loft-like space lacked tables or shelving in the centre of the store, so people could skate right in. Shop assistants were notoriously obnoxious and wouldn't let you touch the clothes if you didn't fit the right profile. The music, usually heavy metal or aggressive New York hip-hop, played too loudly over the speakers. It was intentionally uninviting.
Over the years, that attitude endured. Supreme intentionally releases every product in limited quantities to ensure sell-outs, so people have to work to get it - and once it's gone, almost no product is ever available from the store again. The average Supreme T-shirt is nearly impossible to buy. But, of course, it's not just T-shirts; it's keychains, Mophie battery packs, New York City MetroCards, ramen-noodle bowls, sleeping bags, even steel crowbars with "shit happens" etched on the handle. All of it snapped up instantly.
When a Supreme product comes out, there are only three ways to get it before it hits the resale market: the company's stores, of which there are ten; the online shop, which was launched in 2006; and a high-end boutique called Dover Street Market with outlets in London, New York, Beijing, Singapore and Tokyo. So, if you don't want to pay a huge premium to resellers on eBay and consignment sites (where those Supreme Jordan 5s routinely sell for $450 or more), your best bet is an automated bot. Yes, you're still paying more than the retail price, but it's usually cheaper than eBaying gear after the fact, and it doesn't pass through someone else before you get it.
You've probably seen Supreme clothes, though you may not have given them much thought. They have a consistent utilitarian aesthetic: the brand's logo looks like nothing more than a red rectangle with "Supreme" written in white Futura font inside it. But there are semiotics at play. Hip-hop's sampling ethos runs in streetwear's veins, and designers have long appropriated others' logos and symbols to make new work. In Supreme's case, that red logo is a reference to a series of pieces by conceptual artist Barbara Kruger, who had emblazoned a paper shopping bag with a red box reading, in white Futura, "I shop therefore I am." (When Kruger was made aware of the Supreme logo years later, she responded, "What a ridiculous clusterfuck of totally uncool jokers.")
In 2004, Supreme celebrated its tenth anniversary with a T-shirt that featured a photo of model Kate Moss from an early-90s Calvin Klein campaign, and slapped a Supreme logo on it. Then, in 2012, the company went full ouroboros, releasing a T-shirt depicting Kate Moss wearing a Supreme T-shirt. These connections have become the basis of an Instagram account, countless Reddit posts and even a book.
That in-on-the-joke mentality, as well as the clannish nature of streetwear cool, has created a decades-long frenzy surrounding Supreme's weekly releases. Traditionally, lines would crawl two blocks out from the New York flagship store on Wednesday afternoon to secure Thursday-morning releases. ("That's the Apple Store," I once overheard one oblivious tourist tell another as they walked by on release-day eve.) Recently, though, to appease its SoHo neighbours, Supreme organised a ticketing process: people show up to a designated park, where security guards hand out a limited number of entry tickets. The parks too have become mob scenes.
Yet the trials of in-store shopping seem minor compared with those of the web drops. The e-commerce homepage of Supreme's website is simply a series of narrow rectangular photos showing colours, images and patterns. Clicking on one takes you to the item from which said photo is a sample. Click on a picture of Michael Jackson, say, and up comes a £158 Michael Jackson Hooded Sweatshirt. Back out a page in your browser, click on another rectangle, and you see a pair of £124 cargo pants. All of it is invariably sold out. After a few minutes you might glance down and notice, in teeny-tiny, light-grey type at the bottom of the page, a link that says "view all". The site's design hasn't changed since it launched in 2006.
That's intentional. When the company first considered its e-commerce site, Jebbia wanted it to remain elusive and on-brand. So he decided that all the brand's new releases would go online only on Thursdays, and only at 11:00am. (Jebbia ignored multiple interview requests for this story.) With that he created a culture: the customers knew when to come back, repeatedly, and they understood that they would find something new every time. Scarcity and consistency drove the market, even online.
When the website launched, it was still mostly skaters who knew about Supreme. But as streetwear became popular with other subcultures, the brand's reputation grew. When the rap group Odd Future emerged from Los Angeles around 2010, captivating millennial listeners while rapping about rape and using every slur they could fit between 16 bars, the whole crew - Earl Sweatshirt, Left Brain, even Tyler, the Creator - seemed to wear nothing but Supreme. Meanwhile, Supreme had been partnering with a growing array of other brands, and each unexpected "collab" seduced new shoppers. Over the years, the Supreme logo appeared on limited-edition Everlast boxing gloves, Umbro football shirts and North Face winter jackets.
By the early 2010s, Supreme was the most popular streetwear brand on the planet. Then, in the spring of 2014, the company announced a collaboration with Nike on a basketball shoe called the Foamposite. Supreme had collaborated with trainer companies for years, but Foamposites were especially prized by trainerheads. All of a sudden, Supreme had a whole new audience - one already accustomed to limited releases and camping out to get them. The shoe was to be released on April 3. But by 7pm the night before, more than 3,000 people had swarmed the SoHo shop, forming a line three-and-a-half blocks long, spilling out on to the street and forcing the police to shut down the drop before the store even opened. That's when Supreme made a decision: the next time it released something with that much hype, it would be online-only.
That next time was the drop of the Supreme Air Jordan 5. Before its release, Supreme spent months optimising the site's e-commerce framework so that it wouldn't falter under the load of hundreds of thousands of trainerheads and Supreme obsessives. It never crashed.
It was the trainer world that also, unsurprisingly, gaverise to shopping bots. In 2012, Nike released a shoe called the Air Jordan Doernbecher 9. It's a curvy, white high-top with a trim that looks like wheat stalks. (They're actually hand-painted chicken feathers.) It was designed - well, "curated" - by an 11-year-old named Oswaldo Jimenez, a patient at the Doernbecher Children's Hospital in Portland, Oregon, which had started collaborating with Nike on a series of Jordans to raise money for the hospital.
For the release of the shoe, Nike used a technique it had started experimenting with: the company would fire off a tweet to announce when it would be available. To reserve a pair, you'd have to direct-message back via Twitter with your name and size, essentially sending an RSVP to make a purchase. Several tech-savvy trainerheads wrote scripts that would scan Twitter API streams for keywords such as "Doernbecher" and "RSVP now" and then automatically reply as soon as the tweet went live.
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The effect was clear as soon as the tweet went out. "It was impossible to get those shoes just by clicking," says an Illinois-based, college-age software developer who later created a bot called Heated Sneaks. Some fans realised the Doernbechers hadn't just sold out quickly - they'd sold out unnaturally quickly.
Archemy Omoregie, a 32-year-old electrical engineer who lives in Houston and owns around 250 pairs of trainers, failed to get his hands on a pair of Doernbechers. So to guarantee that he'd be successful the next time around, he designed his own version of the auto-replying Twitter bot. "You could send hundreds of DMs in a tenth of a second," he says of the technology. He wasn't the first to build a bot, but he did expand the idea: he branded it and let other people use a desktop version of it for a fee. After all, non-engineers wanted a chance to get trainers too. He named his tool RSVP Sniper and, in February 2013, started selling access.
As word about the bots spread across forums, more computer-savvy trainerheads jumped in. In 2014, a trainer fan created Another Nike Bot. The New Jersey-based Better Nike Bot opened shop soon after. Then came EasyCop Bot, built by a teenager in Connecticut. Bot-makers also began collaborating on workarounds when trainer companies redesigned their sites or changed their checkout procedures. All the bot-makers started with Nike, but soon, with Supreme being so elusive, everyone was going after it too.
Bots aimed at Supreme gear come in two varieties. One is a simpler add-to-basket service, such as the Supreme Saint. Matt and Chris maintain the bot on their own server and mete out access to it. This kind of bot is essentially a web utility: the buyer picks a product and supplies payment and shipping information, and the bot does the buying at a predetermined time. The Supreme Saint bot can buy only one of each product at a time for simplicity and speed. For shoppers who are just looking to get, for example, a Supreme pillow printed with the cover of the Geto Boys' 1991 album We Can't Be Stopped, that works fine.
With a downloadable app-based bot such as EasyCop Bot, however, customers can assess a suite of advanced settings, such as the ability to add a short delay to the checkout process to fool a potential security measure. By bypassing the web and communicating directly with servers, EasyCop is also able to buy an unlimited number of items, and even lets a buyer create an unlimited number of accounts using proxy servers in case Supreme or Nike suspects foul play and refuses an order. This makes it far more useful for resellers who usually purchase in bulk.
There's plenty of money to be made either way. The day-job salary earned by Omoregie, the electrical engineer who built RSVP Sniper, pales next to the revenue from his add-to-basket and Twitter bots. For Supreme's Jordan 5 release, he pulled in $250,000. The teenager behind EasyCop sells a Supreme variety of his app for $595. By mid-2016, more than 500 people had purchased it. That's nearly $300,000 - and it's only one of five bots he sells.
The Supreme Saint didn't begin as a bot; it was a Twitter account and blog. Matt started it the day of the 2014 Foamposite pandemonium. From then on, every Thursday morning he and Chris would wake up at 6am in Florida - 11.00am in the UK, when Supreme's European online drops happen - and use a proxy server to navigate Supreme's European website. The company was using the same URL format for all of its websites, so Matt just copied the UK links and compiled them into a post on his WordPress blog. That way, when 11.00am rolled around in the States, people could click on the link for the item they wanted on the US site and avoid navigating through the inefficient Supreme homepage. Soon, the Supreme Saint's following grew to the thousands.
No one knew who was behind the Supreme Saint, but Matt and Chris say that people at Supreme definitely knew what they were doing. "We basically destroyed their whole link system," Matt says. About a year after he started posting those early links from the UK site, Supreme changed the URL formats, so the London URLs stopped working in the US. That could have ended Matt and Chris's endeavours, but a few months later they got a message from a couple of coders overseas who had created a Nike bot. The coders wanted to collaborate on a Supreme add-to-cart tool. Matt and Chris figured they could benefit from these guys' experience, so they jumped in.
****: When they first drop, Supreme pieces don't cost much more than a video game - but obsessives who strike out will spend big money on the secondary market to snag the company's coveted hypebeast staples. For example, when it released a £23 logo-stamped brick in August 2016 - yes, a red house brick - it sold out in minutes and went on to fetch £780 on eBay. Here are more examples of the premiums people are willing to pay for that famous logo.
Box logo T-shirt: Retail: £25. Resale: £1,544
Crowbar: Retail: £25. Resale: £145
Supreme IV skate deck: Retail: n/a. Resale: £2,733
Sand timer: Retail: £18. Resale: £64
Box logo sweatshirt: Retail: £115. Resale: £1,171
The coders spent months designing and building the web interface and the add-to-cart bot while Matt and Chris worked on marketing. Even as people began using the bot, the two remained mostly anonymous. Until this article, in fact, most people thought the Supreme Saint was just one guy. Some heard that the Saint was a high-schooler in Florida who had a summer job at Chipotle, others that he went to university in Boston. Those rumours were both right.
In person Matt is about 175cm but looks bigger, given his American-footballer build (he was a defensive tackle in his high-school team). His hair is short on the sides but coiffed in the centre; his beard almost full except for a small triangle in the middle of his chin that refuses to sprout. Chris is thinner and shorter than Matt, with a wide face and eyebrows that jump around when he gets excited, like when he's talking about what the back-end of the adidas website looks like. He's studying photography and film production at university in Boston. He taught himself how to build an earlier version of the Supreme Saint website through YouTube tutorials and Codecademy.
If bot-building sounds sketchy, that's because the tool's legal status is, to be generous, hazy. In the US, New York and California have laws that make bots designed to capture event tickets illegal, and the federal BOTS Act of 2016 made bot ticket-scalping illegal. Beyond that, companies whose sites have been gamed by a bot could conceivably win if they sued the bot-maker. But that only matters if a company does sue - and no trainer or clothing company has. Instead, companies have been ramping up evasive manoeuvres. Adidas created an app called Confirmed that only lets people reserve trainers, which they can then buy at a bricks-and-mortar store in certain cities.
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"When you have this kind of demand for a product, there's going to be someone out there who's going to find a workaround," says Brandon Beaty, former communications director for adidas Originals. "On Confirmed, you're not able to do that. Period." Similarly, Nike updated its own shopping app so that buyers can get trainers via the (supposedly bot-proof) app.
To sue a bot-maker would puncture Supreme's cool-guy image. But the company has waged background warfare for the past few years. It appears to ban IP addresses that seem to be having a little too much success buying its clothes and, instead of using the ubiquitous e-commerce framework Shopify for its back end, built its own harder-to-game web infrastructure. Chris has spent hours examining the Supreme site's source code, looking for changes that could affect the bot's success rate. These are often things, he says, such as added full stops after the letters "CVV" that prevent the bot from figuring out where to insert the necessary credit-card verification code. It takes constant vigilance to keep up with the company's moves.
Still, Supreme knows. And according to Samuel Spitzer, founder of digital commerce company Splay, which created Supreme's online business, it knows everything: who's using bots; where they're getting them; and what they're buying with them. Spitzer says that Supreme's loyalty lies with the real customer, not resellers but "that key customer who wants to buy and actually wear the clothing". In early winter, Splay tweeted a rare view of the metrics: on December 8, the day of a "box logo" jumper release, the website received 986,335,133 page views and 1,935,195,305 purchase attempts to the server.
That's almost three billion interactions for a single release day. (Splay has since deleted the tweet.) Those numbers suggest that bots are swarming the site, but Spitzer says they haven't been a major factor in the company's bottom line. Besides, Matt and Chris don't think they're doing anything wrong. "We're not back-dooring. We're not breaking in with force," Chris says. "If anything, we're actually helping them sell out quicker and make more money," Matt rationalises. Chris shrugs in return. "There will always be a loophole."
And it seems that Supreme will keep trying to close it. For the first drop of the current spring/summer fashion season, the company opened its online store for about a minute and then abruptly shut down the website and banned most of the IP addresses that had been able to get in. Then, in late March, Supreme did the unthinkable: it added a captcha to the site. For years, bots had been bypassing the homepage and heading straight to the item pages, then checking out with impunity; now buyers had to prove they were human.
Still, bots can be updated. Within hours, EasyCop Bot and Heated Sneaks had announced updates - complete with instructional videos on how to use new tools to circumnavigate the captcha. In one, the Connecticut teenager who built EasyCop clicks around his bot's interface, a Lil Uzi Vert instrumental playing in the background, and demonstrates how to use a paid captcha-solving service to store a correct response and end-run Supreme.
These latest manoeuvres, though, haven't really concerned Chris or Matt. Let the people who built other bots - RSVP Sniper, EasyCop, Heated Sneaks - worry about bypassing security. In fact, the Supreme Saint has started to direct its customers their way. Matt and Chris instead want to concentrate on their passion project: an online catalogue for fans, featuring images of every Supreme product that's been released in the past few years. This sort of index doesn't exist - anywhere. Like the clothing itself, once a Supreme collection is gone, it's gone. Matt and Chris's virtual museum will link to eBay and other e-commerce sites. It's a Supreme museum, exit through the gift shop.
Whether the new idea turns out to be lucrative is almost beside the point: they really just love Supreme. Matt has the Supreme fire extinguisher in his parents' kitchen and a wardrobe full of Supreme stuff still in the packaging. He hasn't missed a release in three years. Chris still smiles when he shows off a 2012 email confirming an early Supreme purchases. They dream about a Supreme store opening in Miami and imagine what neighbourhood it would be in, though they know it won't happen.
Besides, Matt and Chris assume their followers will come along. Since they started their Twitter account, the Supreme Saint's fame has only grown. A while ago, Matt and his dad took a trip to Chicago, and Matt tweeted about it from the Saint account. The manager at Nike's Jordan store saw the tweet and invited them to play basketball at a secret court above the shop. The store manager didn't even know who was coming to the secret court. But it didn't matter. Thanks to Supreme, the Saint has influence.
Lauren Schwartzberg (@laurschwar) is a writer at New York magazine. This is her first story for WIRED.
Update: 23/08/2017: The headline of this article has been changed to better reflect the story.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
