The Backpack: Issue #88

• Trend Alert:  Drops with strings attached
  
• What's new in commonsku: The Merch-Off (vote now)!
  
• Can’t Miss Content: Possum Jerseys, Metallica and Love Island
  
  

Red, White and Brew

Dunkin's limited-edition Eagle Cup landed June 29: a 24-oz clear cup with a sculpted eagle lid, $10.99 with a free medium drink attached. And the scarcity is real: 20 cups per store, already flipping for $50 on eBay. If this feels familiar, it's the Bearista playbook with feathers. Our favorite detail is the quiet one, though. Each cup hides a code for $3 Refreshers, one a day, for 30 days. The eagle gets the line out front; the code gets the next thirty visits. Most milestone merch stops at the souvenir but Dunkin smuggled a loyalty program into a lid.

Mountain Dew's 5¢ Soda (Yes, Really)

Mountain Dew is dropping 1,948 limited-edition bundles on TikTok Shop over three days, each with a commemorative can and a 10-pack of minis, priced at five cents — the run sized and priced to the brand's 1948 birth year. Every number means something. One per person, daily quantities teased on Instagram Stories, timed suspiciously well to the patriotic weekend without ever touching the 250th — their heritage, everyone else's mood. Five cents isn't a price, it's a punchline with a UPC (Quartz filed it under the retro-stunt wave, alongside Kellogg's putting toys back in cereal boxes).  And skipping shelves for TikTok Shop is the tell: this was never about selling soda. It's 1,948 units of story, five cents apiece — the cheapest campaign PepsiCo will run all year.
 

Ariana's Merch Doesn't Need a Ticket

Ariana Grande's first tour in seven years travels with a merch pop-up in every city — and a tier system worth studying: some pieces online, some pop-up-only, some you can only buy inside the stadium. No ticket required, which is the genius part. LA presale queues hit 1.1 million for arenas holding 19,000; the pop-up monetizes everyone who didn't get in. In West Hollywood, fans waited hours in lines that wrapped blocks for pieces that won't exist at the concerts. Every queue photo is unpaid media. The Miami shop is open through tomorrow if you want to watch the machine run live. At this point the concerts are starting to feel like a loyalty perk for the retail operation.