Streetwear fashion and lifestyle brands, particularly those highly connected to the industries of denim, graffiti art, music, and various subcultures, are becoming coveted relationships for brands interested in connecting with youth culture today. As we note in Label Networks weekly stories—covering at least 3-7 streetwear brands per week, this scene is important in many ways: It represents how the DIY spirit of a new generation has taken control of fashion, music, art, and basically, recreating their own lifestyles.
For brands such as Pepsi (or Coke, Kraft, Nestle) this connection is important for establishing credibility in various youth cultures. Enter WeSC—a lifestyle “association,” if you will, which original started as a group calling themselves the “Superlative Conspiracy.” Co-founded by Greger Hagelin from Sweden, the SC mostly existed in Europe to start, with his friends including skaters, artists, DJ’s, chefs and other people living an independent and unique lifestyle. As Jesse Cohen, PR director for WeSC noted, “Our denim line has only been out for 5 years—the Superlative Conspiracy started before WeSC the apparel brand. So we opted in this program to design the Diet Pepsi “lifestyle” category.” Diet Pepsi’s plans for the campaign called the Collectible Premium Goods collection featuring limited-edition aluminum bottles designed by various artists, include collaborations with other industries ranging from denim to vehicles, artists, and other crossover genres.
The collaboration however, came about in yet another curious manner of networking: Basically, WeSC has a network of international activists that they tap into, including DJ AM who was chosen by Pepsi to help curate Diet Pepsi’s Collectible Premium Good collection. DJ AM suggested WeSC. WeSC said let’s get another activist, graffiti artist Axis, to do the bottle artwork. Thus the deal was done, creating one of the first bottle/beverage collaborations with a streetwear brand and graffiti artist.
The celebration of the new and first Diet Pepsi collaboration bottle took place at the Video Music Awards a couple of weeks ago in Vegas where celebs came out such as Tommy Lee, Josh Henderson, and of course Paris. Hosted by P. Diddy, WeSC brought out their other activists and fellow Swedes including Ingemar Backman, Timbuktu, Looptroop, as well as artist-skateboarder from Brooklyn Amy Gunther, Chris Pastras, and of course Axis.
The signed, limited-edition Diet Pepsi bottles will be auctioned off on eBay for various charities, with both Pepsi and WeSC matching the winning bid. The Diet Pepsi’s Premium Good WeSC bottle is available at select retailers only.
Overall, this collaboration is an interesting sign of the times whereby giving credibility to the growing culture of streetwear and lifestyle brands and greater reach for small brands such as WeSC, and props to a large beverage brand that could have probably bought their way into the VMA’s but would hardly have had the cred without the relationship of WeSC activists.
