The Parke Mockneck Sweatshirt and NYC Pop-Up: Explained

Jun 08, 2025

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Talk to any woman under 25 with a TikTok addiction, matcha habit, and student ID from a Big Ten school and they likely know about Parke, a fast-growing online brand known for its $125 mock-neck sweatshirts. The oversize, thick cotton tops, with “PARKE” embroidered across the chest, have become a status symbol on campuses from the University of Oklahoma to NYU.

Millennials had collegiate Abercrombie tees and varsity Gap hoodies. Today, the logo-fied trend comes not from a billion-dollar corporation but from a bubbly 28-year-old TikTok influencer named Chelsea Kramer. (Her middle name is Parke.) Kramer started selling sweatshirts less than two years ago. Last year, she says, her business brought in $16 million.

At noon this past Saturday, the line for a three-day Parke pop-up in Soho extended down most of Greene Street and around the corner onto Broome when Lexi, a 27-year-old master’s student, finally made it inside. She and a friend drove in that morning from New Jersey and were 60th in line when they arrived at 6:30 a.m. Lexi owns half a dozen Parke sweatshirts, including a baby blue one she wore with black bike shorts that day. She was there to buy the weekend’s limited-edition New York City–themed version, which bore illustrations of an apple, a taxi, a pretzel, and a coffee cup underneath the Parke logo. “I go to work, and no one knows what this is,” she said. At the pop-up, she was among her people.

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Parke’s third pop-up in the city in a year marked its biggest opening to date. Nearly 1,000 people shopped on Friday. By midday Saturday, the line was calm but slow-moving. “The problem is the dressing rooms,” Kramer said, pointing to four booths lined with striped green curtains before two preteens interrupted to ask for a picture.

Given how many people have tried and failed to turn TikTok fame into brands, Kramer’s success is bewildering. She had a mere 10,000 followers when she started Parke as a line of upcycled vintage denim in 2022. Her mom, Liz Kramer, shipped orders from the family’s garage in New Jersey, and her sister-in-law, Kira Kramer, now the company’s COO, was her first hire. The sweatshirts came a year after the denim and became a viral sensation, turning Kramer into a full-blown influencer with more than 150,000 followers on TikTok and another 80,000 on Instagram.

When I asked Lexi, the New Jersey woman I met at the pop-up, to explain the appeal, she said the sweatshirt’s boxy shape and thick material made her feel more put-together than other crewnecks had. Is that enough to merit waiting nearly six hours in line to buy an eighth one? “Her name’s pretty cool. I like the embroidery,” she said. “I don’t know.” Before she and her friend headed out for lunch at Jack’s Wife Freda, she introduced herself to Kramer and took a picture with her.

Online, Kramer is approachable and soft-spoken — the girl next door with a permanently fresh blowout. Her favorite word is cozy, and her interests include shopping, visiting Paris, and Pilates. Her posts are a light, positive highlight reel of a well-lit life in Miami with her college boyfriend turned fiancé: OOTDs, beach-day snippets, shopping hauls, and Get Ready With Me videos for dinners out on the town. They’re mixed with glimpses into a career track that many young women dream about — a 20-something entrepreneur-influencer running her own business with enough time to travel frequently, work out every day, and look polished but comfortable (almost always in Parke). She teases new styles on her account before they come out by wearing them herself.

Lyla, a 19-year-old student at Ole Miss, said she and her sorority sisters often show up to meals wearing the same style in different colors with their Lululemon leggings. She considers Kramer herself a selling point. “It makes me feel like I know more where my money is going,” she said.

The fervor over Parke is accelerated by its streetwear-style, limited-release strategy. New collections of the loungewear “drop” just about every month in specific colors and fabrics that are rarely restocked. The sales method has sometimes led to backlash. In February, Parke’s Valentine’s Day–themed collection sold out in less than five minutes after it went live on the brand’s website. One frustrated shopper, who described herself as a “ride or die,” posted a video in tears after not being able to buy. “I’m so upset. This is such a superficial problem, I know,” she said. “Stuff should not be selling out in a minute. I get it gives you clout … But make your customers happy.”

Kramer hates when customers can’t buy Parke drops in time, she said when I met her and Kira for coffee a few days before the pop-up. Valentine’s Day is a momentous holiday in the Parke universe. Its first themed collection in 2024 also sold out in a few minutes. “That’s when we realized, Okay, we have something going, and we need to keep up with it,” said Kramer. She said predicting demand for such a young brand has been tricky. Between August 2024, when she placed her order with her manufacturers for 2025, and the release date six months later, her followers doubled. Parke had never seen more than 30,000 people on the site. On that infamous day in February, 80,000 people logged on. “We’re still a small business,” Kramer said. “I guess it’s hard to see that.”

Parke is, in many ways, a family company: Kramer said she self-funded Parke’s initial collections and that it has been profitable since its first year. She now has 13 employees and said she doesn’t take a salary, instead making her income through brand deals. A booth at the pop-up, offering vitamins and tortilla chips from sponsors, helped cover some of the costs of the weekend.

Kramer had little interest in fashion until ninth grade, when her prep school no longer required a uniform. Her first obsession was the Aritzia at the Short Hills Mall. “I became such good friends with the workers,” she said. “I would go in, and they would have everything waiting for me.” After graduating with a degree in art history from Dickinson, Kramer found an e-commerce job at a Miami-based jewelry brand called Alexa Leigh, where she saw how powerful influencer endorsements could be. She didn’t want to just be a professional content creator herself, she said, but she loved to share her shopping finds with friends and family. “From probably day five that I was dating my now-husband, she was like, ‘I got this sweater. I love it so much. I got one for you,’” said Kira.

The first iteration of Parke was a line of trucker hats with ironed-on patches of lightning bolts and smiley faces. That didn’t last, but it taught Kramer how to work a Shopify account. In 2022, she and her mother met a vintage-Levi’s dealer at a flea market in Miami. They visited his warehouse in Los Angeles, bought 200 pairs to tailor to women’s sizes, and Parke went live as an upcycled-denim brand. Kramer quit her job at a fashion sales showroom to focus on her business and threw herself into TikTok, where her steady stream of content slowly grew followers.

In July 2023, Kramer based the first Parke mock-neck design on a vintage college style from her mother’s closet with “Princess Diana vibes,” she said. Kramer had realized upcycled denim was too complicated to scale and decided to create denim jackets, shirts, rompers, and barrel jeans. In the meantime, she had new sweatshirts to sell, including the signature arched varsity style that is meant to be worn almost comically oversize.

Kramer’s popularity on social media also makes her an accessible target for criticism when drops sell out or someone’s order arrives with a stain. Engage with her videos enough and you’ll soon be served the inevitable counternarrative from someone eager to “de-influence” other young women and question the hype around Parke and other TikTok-popular logo sweatshirts from labels such as Daily Drills, the Bar, and Dairy Boy.

In April, a TikTok user who goes by Sustainable Fashion Friend posted two viral videos claiming Parke’s branding was a “trick.” She said that by carefully zooming in on Kramer’s videos, she had found Parke’s Chinese factories listed on Alibaba, where she noticed that some of the listed items resembled pieces from Parke’s collections at much cheaper prices. She accused Parke of white labeling, or putting its logo on boxer shorts and pajamas that manufacturers make for multiple brands to sell at a premium.

The videos are compelling if you’re looking for a reason not to buy Parke — and if you haven’t noticed just how many trendy retailers are selling barrel-leg jeans and boxer shorts at the moment. But in the U.S., most major brands use third-party factories in Asia to manufacture their apparel in bulk. The price they pay the factory is always lower than what the customer pays. Alibaba is a giant Chinese wholesale platform on which many American retailers find suppliers, and the quality of the final products can vary depending on the factory.

Kramer said Parke doesn’t white label its products and that she works with a technical designer to design samples that go through several rounds of changes in fit, wash, and color. Kramer often wades into the comments left by shoppers, addressing their complaints about shipping delays or other product issues, but she said she’s not going to publicly respond to the videos about her process. “When something’s still not true, I feel like giving it attention is just gonna make something worse,” she said.

In April, Chelsea and Kira had bigger problems than TikTok punditry: President Trump’s new tariff policy and escalating trade war with China, where, yes, most of Parke’s products are manufactured. They delayed as many shipments as they could, rescheduled some collection releases to the fall, and are looking for new factories elsewhere. They contemplated canceling the New York City pop-up owing to shipping delays, and they’ll raise prices slightly in the coming months.

Coming out of the Valentine’s Day sellout, “we went through a shift where we were like, ‘Okay, we shouldn’t be so conservative,’” said Kira. “It’s so easy to get caught up in the success, and we’ve always been mindful about trying not to get ahead of ourselves.” To contend with demand amid their tariff concerns, they will increase the inventory available in all future collections but plan to release fewer collections this year overall.

“We’re not even three years old, and we’ve always known things could change overnight,” said Kira. Both women are cognizant that a status sweatshirt can’t maintain its status forever. What comes after the mock-neck for Parke? “I think about it every day,” Chelsea said.

For now, Kramer’s fans are far from over it. “Honestly, I haven’t bought another sweatshirt besides Parke in a while,” said Allie Sisco, a 21-year-old University of Delaware student who joined the pop-up line on Saturday at 5:45 a.m. and owns 15 Parke sweatshirts. Her passion is as much about Kramer as it is about the leisurewear itself. “I’ve been following Chelsea for so long. She’s a role model and someone I aspire to be like,” Sisco said. “Just seeing the actual store with the sign and her pictures on the wall, I was like, Is this real life?” When Kramer came outside to say hello to the early risers, Sisco shook with nerves. Once inside, she recovered enough to buy, among other pieces, a pair of yet-to-be-released elastic-waist denim shorts — a major get. “I wanted to feel like I have something that’s not even out yet,” Sisco said. And when she did? “It was probably the best day ever.”