Chelsea Kramer found her hit product by accident.
She launched her apparel brand, Parke (her middle name), in 2022, with the goal of selling sustainable, comfortable denim. While the jeans did well enough, on a whim, she made a prototype of a mockneck sweatshirt and shared a photo of it on Instagram. Her followers told her to sell it, so she figured why not.
“We had a minuscule amount of inventory, but they sold out in an hour,” Kramer told BoF of the sweatshirt’s launch in July 2023. “Seeing those numbers, I was like ‘Oh my god, we’re onto something here.’”
Today, sweatshirts represent the vast majority of Parke’s sales, and Kramer said they’ve been the biggest driver of the business — they still routinely sell out with every drop. Their success has allowed her to expand into other categories, like outerwear and sweaters, and has also helped boost denim sales.
Five years on from the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, when people shed their office attire in favour of loungewear, sweatshirts are having another moment. From last September to this month, the amount of fashion content on TikTok featuring sweatshirts increased by 898 percent, according to analytics firm Trendalytics. In particular, branded sweatshirts from a small cohort of digital native brands — including Parke, Daily Drills, The Bar, Dairy Boy in the US and Mr Winston in Melbourne, as well as the more established Anine Bing and Sporty & Rich — which have become a must-have for countless Gen-Z and young Millennial customers.
“It’s the new cool girl outfit,” said Daily Drills co-founder MaryRalph Lawson. “You can wear it to class, and then go to the gym and feel comfortable, but still put together and stylish.”
As Millennial college girls once lived in neon Nike shorts and oversized T-shirts, Gen-Z wants sweats — though they don’t just wear them with leggings and sneakers, but also jeans and a pair of boots.
The new generation of sweatshirt brands, however, are all led by creators who built a profile online to varying degrees of fame before launch. Bridget Bahl, founder of The Bar, has 1.5 million followers on Instagram for example, while Daily Drills co-founder Kennedy Crichlow has over 57,000. While their influencer status helps drive attention to their brands, that alone isn’t enough to turn a simple wardrobe staple — one that you can buy a version of for less than $20 on Amazon — into a must-have. Instead, their success can be attributed to a combination of thoughtful design, a clear-cut brand identity and active community engagement.
Though it wasn’t their intention, these brands are following a playbook first set by streetwear labels like Supreme and Stüssy in the 2010s: releasing product via a drop model, a community-based marketing strategy, and scarcity-driven hype.
They’ve grown so quickly — Parke’s social media engagement is up over 8000 percent within the last year, according to Trendalytics — that all have seen demand outstrip supply, with their sweatshirts routinely sold out. That dynamic helps those pieces become even more coveted among followers, but also creates frustration and can threaten long-term potential.
“The drops are so feverish, girls set their alarms,” said Casey Lewis, the author of After School, a newsletter about Gen-Z culture. “Every time, I see a wave of TikToks that are excited about the drop, but then on the backside of that, there are girls who say ‘If you are participating in this, you are an idiot.’”
In looking to the future, these founders not only want to get their supply chain under control, but also convince shoppers to fall in love with more than just their sweatshirts, entering new categories and experimenting with retail.
The Magic of a Sweatshirt
The irony of the sweatshirt sensation is, like Parke, most of the “it”-brands right now didn’t start selling sweats.
Bahl’s The Bar began as a ready-to-wear brand in 2019; she launched its “Varsity” sweatshirt in June 2020 as a “last ditch attempt to keep the brand going” during the pandemic, she said. Daily Drills, founded by best friends Lawson and Crichlow, started with activewear, and later introduced sweatshirts to wear over their leggings and sports bras. Paige Lorenze’s Dairy Boy is the exception; its initial collection in 2021 included sweatshirts and hats.
The founders all have theories as for why sweatshirts became their best seller. Kramer, for instance, said she thinks it’s in part because a sweatshirt is something you can confidently buy without trying it on in advance. Lawson and Cricholow feel that post-pandemic, people wanted more clothing options that made them feel put together, but still comfortable.
But much of the appeal lies in the thoughtful design of sweats made specifically for women, with details that may seem small but make a difference.
Daily Drills paid extra to create a product with the perfect oversized width that wasn’t too long, as men’s extra-large sweatshirts often are on a woman. Parke’s best seller has a mockneck, a nod to the much mood-boarded photos of Princess Diana in the 1990s. Bahl said The Bar’s was meant to fit like “ your boyfriend’s sweatshirt,” while Dairy Boy has won over fans by leaning into its distinct identity of New England nostalgia; its most recent sell-out hit is a pink camo-printed sweat set.
Of course, having founders that are something of social media “it”girls themselves doesn’t hurt. Omnipresent among other Gen-Z TikTok creators like Brett Chody and Abby Baffoe, these brands have become a signifier of a very specific exclusive club.
“[People] want to be like Chelsea [Kramer],” said Brooke Yoakam, a marketing strategist and content creator. When you see one, she said, it creates that feeling of “‘Oh my gosh, she has the Parke sweatshirt,’ especially knowing they’re hard to get.”
Growing Pains
All that buzz, however, has brought challenges. Keeping product in stock, for one. Hype may build demand, but it can quickly turn to frustration if consumers routinely fail to purchase. Both Lorenze and Kramer have taken to TikTok to candidly speak to their followers about the challenges of inventory planning for a growing, self-funded business.
They’re working to keep up: Parke is working with a data analyst to better plan inventory, and does monthly restocks of its core collection so shoppers can plan purchases accordingly. Daily Drills does a drop every two weeks; its goal is to keep core collections in stock, and introduce limited-edition colours to maintain excitement. Both Lorenze and Kramer floated the idea of offering pre-orders, too.
Plenty of shoppers have multiple versions — Bahl said 50 percent of those who purchased their latest drop were returning customers — but they’re still finding ways to keep them exciting. Parke released a Valentine’s Day-themed drop in February, while The Bar has created versions of its sweatshirt in new fabrics, such as corduroy, and colours. New product categories, too, play a role: Dairy Boy launched a home subbrand American Charm, last fall, while Lawson said that they look at how customers are styling their pieces on social media for inspiration. For example, after seeing girls pair their crewnecks with poplin pants, they released their own version.
“We had so many mentors at the beginning tell us to stick to one category,” said Crichlow. “What really served us well is that … pretty much anything that we feel like we’re missing in our closets, we can make and put our patch on.”
Retail, too, is on the horizon: Dairy Boy, Daily Drills and Parke have all experimented with retail via wildly popular New York City pop-ups over the last year; Parke also entered wholesale with Shopbop in January, while Dairy Boy sells on Revolve.
In charting their next steps, this generation of sweatshirt makers can look to brands like Sporty & Rich and Anine Bing, both of which still sell sweats but have successfully grown beyond that category alone. Julie Bourgeois, Anine Bing’s global brand president, said that they view the sweatshirt as their “gateway” product; it represents a third of new purchases. But in the brand’s imagery, they make sure to show it styled with other items in the collection, worn underneath a blazer or with a pair of jeans.
Ultimately, getting consumers to buy into more than just your hero product comes down to having a clear identity, said Emily Oberg, the founder of Sporty & Rich, which now sells denim, outerwear and even beauty and sexual wellness. It launched a line of vibrators earlier this month, all through the lens of old-school sportswear.
“It’s just creating a feeling,” she said. “If you have a strong identity and a strong world you’ve built, you can literally put a logo on anything and people will buy it.”
