“The Designs Are Way Cuter”: The Big Business of Bootleg Merch

The buzz has extended beyond the venues themselves. In almost every neighborhood of the city, you’re bound to bump into vendors who have set up shop near parks, subway stations, and bars looking to meet the fervent demand for soccer kits, Styles swag and Knicks gear. Influencers have promoted the products on Instagram and TikTok, and fans are sharing information about where you can find the apparel in group chats. The result is a black market operating in plain sight.

The bootleg boom

Although there are occasional calls from companies like Merch Traffic to crack down on bootleg apparel, hardly anyone in position to do something about it seems to care. “We are definitively not enforcing it at the level that we used to,” says Robert Boland, a sports law professor at Seton Hall Law School.

There is no official data on the size of the unlicensed apparel industry because it is decentralized and unregulated; based on its proliferation alone, however, it appears to be thriving. The most obvious explanation for the bootleg boom is that there’s a massive market for merch right now. Recognizing this, brands have opened new avenues to sell apparel to their fans beyond venues, flagship stores and the internet, most notably via pop-up shops. Offering exclusive merch and perks, these off-site auxiliary outlets have quickly morphed into their own marquee events for fans, who post about their hauls and the experience on social media, thus drawing additional attention to the products and enticing others to participate in the superfan economy. Just scroll through TikTok and you’ll see the four to six-hour lines to get into Styles’s pop-up in Lower Manhattan.

On top of this attention-fueled demand spike, the apparel industry is still dealing with the supply chain hurdles that sprung up during Covid, says Boland. These supply issues, along with the high costs for companies to acquire licensing rights, have caused the prices of official merch to skyrocket. The cheapest official Styles tour T-shirt costs $50, inside the Garden or at the Lower Manhattan pop-up shop, with the most expensive licensed clothes — Together, Together hoodies and the New York Harry Styles sports jersey — going for $85. The official New York Knicks Fanatics NBA Finals Champions men’s tees cost $65 at the NBA team store; the jerseys, $79.99.