About 50 people gathered in a Financial District alley last Thursday to watch startup employees walk a spray-painted orange runway in logo tees and branded sweatshirts. It was a party, and also a budget line item.

About 50 people gathered in a Financial District alley outside Corgi Cafe on June 25 to watch roughly 20 startup employees walk a spray-painted orange asphalt runway in logo T-shirts and branded sweatshirts. The Founder Fashion Show — co-hosted by three local startups, organized by Corgi employee Laura Dang, 22 — ran about 10 minutes, per the SF Standard, which covered the event. One model wore a black fleece vest, no shirt, and flexed at the end. The crowd cheered over a tiny Bluetooth speaker.

The show was fizzy, but it was also a business decision. AI startups flush with capital are spending heavily to get noticed in the current boom: thousands on Highway 101 billboards, thousands more on social-media hype videos, and now, apparently, fashion events. "Like a walking billboard," Dang told the Standard. Elena Lenena, 34, CEO of Growee — an AI workflow automation startup — walked the runway in bedazzled fringe and stilettos and told the paper she has accidentally built a side hustle consulting for other founders on their merch game. "In San Francisco the bar is really kind of low by default," she said.

The impulse is as old as the Valley's boom cycle. SF's thrift stores are famously stocked with shirts from dead startups, each one a relic of a company that once believed hard enough in a logo to put it on cotton. Ryan McEntush, an investor at Andreessen Horowitz, posted on X the same week about a site he built to surface vintage corporate merch from Apple to Enron — an archaeology project from previous cycles.

Whether this particular batch of branded hoodies gets anywhere near the thrift rack, or just runs one alley show and calls it branding, is a question the next down round will answer.