Developer merch deserves a better marketplace

Almost everyone in tech has the same drawer. Conference t-shirts, a hoodie from a company they left, stickers from a booth they can no longer place, a few pins, a plushie that was handed out at a keynote.

These collectibles do not disappear. They pile up. They sit at the back of a wardrobe, kept because throwing them out would feel wrong, worn twice a year, carried through three house moves before somebody finally gives up on them. Meanwhile, at every conference, someone spends an afternoon hunting for one specific t-shirt from a booth that ran out on the first morning.

The obvious answer is to resell them, and the obvious answer does not work. Search a generic resale app for a limited-edition AWS piece and it will walk you past actual ski jackets before it finds anything, because its catalogue has no idea what it is looking at. To an algorithm trained on fashion, a Kubernetes hoodie is a grey sweatshirt in size L. To the person who wants it, it is a trophy, the memory of one deployment, a badge from a conference in 2018.

That gap is the entire company. People in tech love merch: laptops carry the stack in stickers, and closets carry the rest. What was missing was never the demand. It was a catalogue that recognises what these objects are.

Looties is a peer-to-peer marketplace for tech swag: conference t-shirts, stickers, pins, caps, plushies, and the rare limited-edition pieces that never had a resale home. Swag is the unofficial language of the developer world, so the catalogue is built to speak it. Brands, conferences and editions are first-class, which means a listing can state what an object actually is instead of approximating it as clothing.

It is not another generic second-hand site with a tech filter bolted on. Put less carefully, Looties is:

In August 2026, a hundred objects from tech culture were standing on acrylic plinths in the main hall of STATION F. The exhibition ran a full month, from July 28 to August 22: a Kubernetes sweatshirt in a display case, a Google Cloud logo on a plinth, a wall of stickers pinned by the internet. As far as anyone could tell, it was the first museum of tech culture ever staged.

It was not a marketing stunt dressed up as a museum. It was the argument itself, made physical. Give these objects a plinth, a label and a room, and people stop reading them as leftovers and start reading them as culture. More than 500 visitors walked that hall over the month and did exactly that.

The press came for the objects, not for the company. Les Échos walked the hall at the end of July and reported visitors calling the pieces collector material. On August 7, BFM Business ran the exhibition on Good Morning Business. Neither piece was a product announcement, which is the point: the objects carried the story on their own.

The same year, Vogue, Forbes, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal all wrote about tech merch becoming culture, and about the money moving through its secondary market. Looties is not the subject of those articles. It is the infrastructure their subject was missing.

Looties does not pretend to be finished. It ships, it says what changed, and it says what is coming next. All three are published, so none of it has to be taken on trust.

The changelog has carried every user-visible change since launch day, 64 of them so far, each with its ship date and none of the plumbing. The roadmap shows what sits in backlog, alpha and beta right now, with a Discord next to it so people can argue about the order. And the tooling built along the way is published too.