Lifestyle Brands<\/em><\/a>, cowritten by management professor Stefania Saviolo and brand consultant Antonio Marazza. Using the products they sell is a symbolic act, a way to \u201cto signal status\u201d or demonstrate \u201ca sense of belonging to a group.\u201d<\/p>\nGenerally, lifestyle brands are known for products they sell to the public. People recognize Tesla as a company that sells cars, and Zyn as a company that sells nicotine pouches. To state the obvious, Palantir is not a clothing company. And the software it does sell is not consumer-facing. Its price tag is so large that, often, giant government agencies and corporations are the only ones that can afford it. Palantir is not exactly an obvious candidate for a lifestyle brand. And yet, despite the odds, Palantir has a fan base that includes many potential merch customers.<\/p>\n
Palantir bros are not hard to encounter online: There are several Palantir-focused subreddits, the largest of which has 109,000 members. Some people on X have been able to amass huge followings by posting exclusively about the company throughout the day.<\/p>\n
Palantir fans can obsessively focus on the company\u2019s stock price. They can behave like American football fans when it goes up, celebrating as if their team scored a touchdown. When it gets a big contract, it\u2019s as if their team got a new star player. In this context, it makes sense that people would want to purchase merch\u2014it\u2019s like buying a jersey.<\/p>\n
Palantir\u2019s fan base gradually expanded during the years that contractors for immigration enforcement and the military were least popular in Silicon Valley. For fans, Palantir was a contrarian dark horse that stood by its principles, even though others detested them.<\/p>\n
For Palantir, becoming a lifestyle brand seems more about getting the company\u2019s fans to publicly identify with its brand and its mission. This is made explicit on a white note card, with CEO Alex Karp\u2019s signature, that was included with recent orders of Palantir merch.<\/p>\n
\u201cThank you for your dedication to Palantir and our mission to defend the West,\u201d the card reads. \u201cThe future belongs to those who believe and build. And we build to dominate.\u201d<\/p>\n
Younes has expressed a similar sentiment. \u201cPalantir isn't just a software company,\u201d he wrote on X in August. \u201cIt\u2019s a world view\u2014western values, pro-warfighter, problem solving, conviction, dominant software, etc. that\u2019s why people rep the gear.\u201d<\/p>\n
These values have not always been popular in Silicon Valley. In fact, historically, they\u2019ve been outright rejected. In 2018, thousands of Google workers rallied against the company\u2019s involvement in Project Maven, a Pentagon project analyzing drone footage with AI. Conceding to the workers, Google chose to not renew its Maven contract but said it wouldn\u2019t stop working with the Pentagon. That same year, protests against Palantir were popping up in Palo Alto in response to the company\u2019s work with ICE. (ICE did not cancel any contracts.)<\/p>\n
However, under the second Trump administration, the tech world is beginning to openly embrace aligning with the military\u2014both transactionally, and symbolically. In June, the Army commissioned an elite group of tech executives to be \u201clieutenant colonels.\u201d Palantir chief technology officer Shyam Sankar was joined by Meta chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth, OpenAI chief product officer Kevin Weil, and current Thinking Machines Lab adviser and former OpenAI chief research officer Bob McGrew, who also worked at Palantir.<\/p>\n
Palantir\u2019s current merch store appears to capitalize on this vibe change and communicate that the company is doubling down on its reputation, branding, and mission. In an April letter to shareholders, Karp wrote that its mission \u201cwas for years dismissed as politically fraught and ill-advised.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe, the heretics, this motley band of characters, were cast out and nearly discarded by Silicon Valley,\u201d Karp wrote. \u201cAnd yet there are signs that some within the Valley have now turned a corner and begun following our lead.\u201d<\/p>\n
One of Palantir\u2019s first merch releases was a black shirt with a giant red graphic. The oblong shape resembles an oval projection of the earth. There are three lines inside the oval that evoke latitude-longitude lines, or a wireframe globe. In the direct center, there\u2019s the Palantir logo. Symbolically, it looks like Palantir is controlling the world.<\/p>\n
Ironically, one of the most common misconceptions about Palantir is that it\u2019s one giant database with information from every single one of its clients. The company has published several blogs trying to dispel this myth on a factual basis.<\/p>\n
This shirt, by contrast, appears to take a different approach. It symbolically mocks, embraces, and dismisses this misconception. It seemingly was created with precisely Karp\u2019s \u201cheretics\u201d in mind.<\/p>\n
Made in America<\/h2>\n
At the core of Palantir\u2019s merch identity is its insistence that all of the products are \u201cMade in the U.S.A.\u201d Like many other companies, Palantir wants to evoke a sense of pride in supporting American workers.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s very expensive to produce clothes made in the United States\u2014especially ones with custom tags and high-quality materials, as the company claims. Palantir\u2019s head of strategic development has said that the goal of the merch store, financially, is to simply break even. When the website relaunched, Younes blamed tariffs for the higher cost of the merchandise. \u201cThis will not be a new revenue stream,\u201d he posted in May 2024. Simply put, Palantir doesn't have to do this.<\/p>\n
In fact, Palantir has actually tried and failed to run a merch store before. Archives of the old store show a simple white website with nondescript T-shirts and hats. At the time, some customers complained that they were cheaply made and unattractive. Palantir shut it down in 2023.<\/p>\n
Palantir isn\u2019t alone. The defense tech company Anduril, which is known for embracing working with US immigration authorities early in its history, launched a \u201cgear store\u201d shortly after Palantir relaunched its own. It sells shiny black flight jackets, Hawaiian shirts (not unlike the ones CEO Palmer Luckey is known to sport), and T-shirts that say \u201cworkatanduril.com\u201d in black sans serif text overlain with \u201cDON\u2019T\u201d scrawled in black graffiti, seemingly in an attempt to look rebellious and cheeky. Like Palantir, the company is eager to note when its products are \u201cMade in the USA.\u201d<\/p>\n
WIRED was unable to independently confirm details about the production of Palantir and Anduril merch, including whether it was made in America, or which manufacturers they used. Neither company responded to a request for comment on the topic.<\/p>\n
Garments made in the US are typically made by immigrants, which make up more than 40 percent of the workforce. Many of them are undocumented, and can be compensated by tasks completed rather than being paid by the hour, which overwhelmingly adds up to far below the minimum wage.<\/p>\n
Palantir has been doing a lot of work for ICE under Trump 2.0. Since April, it has been building \u201cImmigrationOS,\u201d a new system for the agency to, ideally, have \u201cnear real-time visibility\u201d on people self-deporting. (Public documents are not clear about how ImmigrationOS would do this, or what data it would use.) ICE is paying Palantir $30 million to do this.<\/p>\n
Palantir is scheduled to provide ICE with a prototype of ImmigrationOS on September 25. On September 18, it released new merch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Save StorySave this storySave StorySave this story Palantir Technologies, which moved from Silicon Valley to Denver in 2020, sells software that immigration authorities use to identify and arrest people, militaries use to organize drone strikes, and corporations use to manage their supply chains. Now, it also sells tote bags. Last year, Palantir relaunched an online […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":32768,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-32767","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32767"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32767\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}