A Toronto fashion brand’s new line of retro caps selling for $10K was not only met with overwhelming demand, but sold out pretty much immediately. Though the sticker price is actually quite deceiving in this case, all part of a ploy to stimy reselling bots and keep these limited lids in the hands of collectors.
Toronto fashion brand Styll teamed up with New Era 59FIFTY on a series of retro baseball caps repping Toronto, Chicago, and Los Angeles sports franchises, with hometown teams the Blue Jays and Raptors both appearing in various styles.
Among the various teams and retro designs offered, lid-lovers were drooling over the Cappuccino, Olive Corduroy, and Night Star designs, standing out with their unbelievable price tags of $10,000.
No, that’s not a typo. And also, no, that’s not what they actually cost.
The sky-high prices were actually just a clever deception, devised as a way to trip up bots that jump on hot clothing and accessory releases and re-sell them with marked-up prices at the expense of collectors.
After receiving a rebate code through Instagram, the actual human buyers trying to score a rare Raps or Jays hat ended up having the bulk of the outrageous sticker price refunded, paying in the range of $55-60, a much more reasonable price for a hat.
And the strategy seemed to work, the limited run of hats releasing on Thursday, flying off virtual shelves and selling out in the blink of an eye.
A representative of Styll tells blogTO that the company has issued weekly limited releases of products over the last year, but has struggled with bots scooping up all of their stock for resale before dedicated fans could get their orders in, explaining that “We would sell out in less than five seconds.”
The company tried less extreme measures like passwording their site, but bots were still making it through, “so we decided to price the hats at 10 thousand to have the bots not able to check out.”
Any bots that did make it through at that ridiculous price were refunded, though Styll now has their info to prevent them from future meddling.
As for the actual human customers, they had to follow Styll and view the company’s IG story for the actual retail price.
With such a successful run using the fake $10K price tags, Styll is already looking to meet future demand, saying, “we do plan on restocking in the future but I usually split up big collections into parts 1 and 2.”