The technology industry's latest marketing frontier extends far beyond code and algorithms. Companies like Figma, Palantir, and OpenAI are investing heavily in curated merchandise collaborations, signalling a fundamental shift in how tech firms wish to be perceived by the public. Rather than the grey hoodies and generic conference swag that once defined Silicon Valley's aesthetic, these organisations are now partnering with established designers and artisanal makers to produce limited-edition products that blur the line between corporate branding and fashion statement. Figma's seasonal collections developed with hip brands like Dinner Service exemplify this strategy, as does Palantir's controversial US$239 chore coat and OpenAI's newly launched Supply Co shop, which offers everything from embroidered half-zip sweaters to tie-dyed ChatGPT basketballs. This phenomenon, which observers have termed "corpcore," represents perhaps the most visible manifestation of tech's broader obsession with taste and aesthetic differentiation.
The transformation from functional workwear to aspirational merchandise reflects a deeper anxiety within the technology sector. Until recently, Silicon Valley cultivated an identity as deliberately unfashionable, celebrating technical prowess over visual presentation. The stereotypical tech worker uniform—hoodies, sneakers, and logo-laden conference giveaways handed out by the boxload—embodied a culture that prided itself on indifference to conventional notions of style and refinement. Thais Castello Branco, founder of Taste Labs, an AI startup, articulates the philosophical reversal underway: "Historically, it was cool to signal you did not care. More and more, there has been this value around aesthetics and around quality and care and craft." This recalibration suggests that the industry recognises something fundamental has shifted in how it must present itself to maintain cultural relevance and influence.
Underlying this merchandising explosion is a more existential concern about artificial intelligence's impact on human labour and value. As AI systems become increasingly capable of generating code, creative content, and design work at remarkable speed, technologists are grappling with what remains uniquely human in an age of algorithmic abundance. The emerging consensus frames taste—the ability to discern quality, judge aesthetic merit, and recognise genuine craftsmanship—as perhaps the final frontier of human competitive advantage. Some commentators have explicitly positioned taste as a new core skill and the only remaining "moat" protecting human workers from obsolescence. Young tech professionals have even begun organising taste-themed dinner parties as informal networks, essentially treating aesthetic discrimination as both a professional skill and social currency. In this context, merchandise serves dual purposes: it allows companies to signal alignment with human values and creativity while simultaneously allowing employees and consumers to perform their own refined taste through purchase and display.
Yet the timing and nature of this embrace of artisanal quality has drawn considerable criticism from observers who view it as fundamentally hypocritical. As artificial intelligence tools proliferate and increasingly produce what critics dismiss as "digital slop"—mediocre, derivative content generated at scale—tech companies are simultaneously investing in designer collaborations and premium craftwork. This apparent contradiction has prompted accusations of "taste-washing," a term suggesting that corporations are attempting to co-opt the aesthetics and values of human craftsmanship precisely at the moment they are displacing human craftspeople with automation. The criticism cuts across demographic lines, resonating with workers concerned about job displacement, artists worried about copyright and compensation, and philosophical observers troubled by technology's relationship to authenticity and meaning. Whether designer merchandise can genuinely counter this backlash remains an open question, particularly given that the merchandise itself often reflects trends rather than originates them.
The commercial imperative driving this shift is equally important. The technology sector's traditional marketing ethos, famously articulated by venture capitalist and author Antonio García Martínez as "marketing is like sex: only losers pay for it," presumed that superior products would generate their own demand without expensive promotion. This assumption held as long as technological advantage conveyed real competitive moats. In the contemporary AI-dominated landscape, however, that logic has inverted. With artificial intelligence commoditising certain classes of technical work and dramatically lowering barriers to entry, competition has intensified exponentially. Every startup and established company possesses capital and access to similar foundational models, eliminating the exclusive technical advantages that once justified low-spending marketing strategies. Consequently, tech firms are deploying increasingly sophisticated promotional tactics, from viral launch videos to branded billboards featuring impenetrable jargon, from aerial banner advertising to branded social spaces. One AI software startup, Monaco, spends US$6,000 daily on plane banners over San Francisco, calculating this cheaper than highway billboard rentals. Corgi, an AI insurance company, opened a 24-hour cafe in San Francisco's financial district explicitly designed for recruitment and team building. Merchandise has become a critical component of this broader repositioning strategy.
The mechanics of these merchandise initiatives reveal sophisticated understanding of contemporary consumer psychology. OpenAI's Supply Co and Perplexity Supply both employ limited-edition release strategies mimicking streetwear culture, with items frequently selling out and generating secondary market demand. Perplexity explicitly frames its merchandise not as profit centres but as extensions of brand identity, with promotional language emphasising quality and craftsmanship. The company's full-grain leather journals with refillable pages bound by brass rings represent a striking contrast to traditional corporate promotional items. Rather than seeking financial returns, Perplexity measures success through brand association and customer acquisition, having sold approximately 10,000 items since launch. This willingness to subsidise merchandise reflects the economics of AI companies with substantial venture capital backing, where customer acquisition costs are routinely absorbed as acceptable business expenses. For Perplexity, the brand association with taste and thoughtfulness potentially generates far greater value than straightforward profit margins.
However, fashion industry observers remain sceptical about the aesthetic authenticity of these initiatives. Jonah Weiner, a fashion commentator, characterises contemporary tech merchandise as derivative, noting that designs echo mid-2010s streetwear trends, Kanye West tour merchandise aesthetic, and millennial direct-to-consumer branding conventions. Rather than expressing unique corporate culture or design philosophy, most offerings appear generic, assembled from familiar visual languages that achieved peak popularity years earlier. Weiner identifies "a little blankness to what they're offering," suggesting that while individual pieces may be well-crafted, the collections collectively fail to convey distinct brand identity or cultural specificity. This critique raises important questions about whether merchandise can genuinely shift public perception or instead merely performatively signals values without substantive commitment. The risk exists that merchandise becomes another form of greenwashing or in this case, taste-washing—surface-level gesturing toward human values without accompanying operational or philosophical change.
Companies manufacturing and designing these items come from contrasting philosophical traditions. Perplexity's collaborator Ugmonk, founded by Jeff Sheldon in 2008 in Downingtown, Pennsylvania, explicitly positions itself against the growth obsession dominating technology investment. Sheldon has repeatedly declined venture capital, maintaining strategic independence and treating expansion as secondary to quality and intentionality. Ugmonk's website features a parable about a fisherman content with modest sustainable income, refusing a businessman's advice to expand, industrialise, and pursue millionaire status. This narrative directly inverts Silicon Valley's growth-at-all-costs ethos, with Sheldon describing his approach as "the polar opposite of what AI is doing." His characterisation is worth noting: "We're slow, methodical, thoughtful, and AI is like slop, fast and crass and just, like, throw things at the wall." By partnering with such makers, tech companies may genuinely be attempting to signal alignment with alternative values. Y Combinator's shift from generic heather-grey T-shirts to custom Ugmonk journals similarly suggests institutional recognition that merchandising can express deliberate design philosophy. Eve Bouffard, Y Combinator's head of design, championed the upgrade precisely because it communicated intentionality, imagining that founders taking notes on paper during meetings rather than staring at screens might foster deeper connections and more thoughtful collaboration.
The broader industry recognition that taste itself requires technological solution indicates the depth of this philosophical moment. Taste Labs, founded by Castello Branco, raised US$18.5 million to develop artificial intelligence systems capable of evaluating content quality and filtering low-quality AI-generated material from proliferating digital ecosystems. Castello Branco's concern that the internet will become saturated with mediocre algorithmic output, and that humans will habituate to this degradation without recognising it as abnormal, drove her entrepreneurial mission. Rather than ceding taste to human judgment alone, she envisions AI systems trained to recognise quality and guide content curation. This represents perhaps the ultimate irony of tech's taste obsession: as human judgment becomes increasingly rare and valuable, companies simultaneously invest in artificial intelligence to systematise and automate taste evaluation. Whether such automation can genuinely capture what makes taste meaningful—the human capacity to recognise quality, to make discriminating judgments, to appreciate craftsmanship—remains profoundly uncertain.
For Malaysian and Southeast Asian readers observing these trends, the implications extend beyond fashion or branding aesthetics. These merchandise initiatives signal how technology companies globally are repositioning themselves within broader cultural conversations about AI's societal impact. As artificial intelligence deployment accelerates throughout the region's economy, technology firms will increasingly employ similar strategies to manage perceptions and narratives around automation and labour displacement. The embrace of artisanal values and aesthetic quality represents an attempt to situate AI within humanistic frameworks rather than purely technical or economic ones. Whether such repositioning meaningfully addresses legitimate concerns about job displacement, environmental impact, or data sovereignty remains to be determined. Nonetheless, the willingness of major tech companies to invest in designer merchandise and aesthetic differentiation demonstrates recognition that technological capability alone no longer determines market success or cultural authority. The battle for legitimacy increasingly occurs in cultural and aesthetic domains rather than purely through technical innovation. How the region's own emerging technology sectors adopt, adapt, or resist these global trends will shape not only their market positioning but also local conversations about what technology culture represents and values.
