Originally Posted by BigLescobar
if people think a factory is producing 60 pairs of a few hundred pairs at a time of Space Jams then they have no understanding about what economies of scale is and how it relates to the cost of producing shoes in a factory. As someone with experience in the footwear industry and knowledge of how the sourcing/ manufacturing process works in these factories, to think they are just making 100 or 200 pairs here or there is not feasible and makes zero sense.
The cost per pair would be extremely high to to that limited amount of a run, if they were still producing them there would be floods of thousands of pairs, not just restocks of 50 or 60 pairs here or there....
When factories produce something like the concords or whatever GR jordan for a main run they are producing upwards of 250k plus pairs in mens sizes. I saw a 30k figure floating around here before which would not even be enough for a major chain to order, let alone as a total production run.
My best guess as to why the space jams are still appearing is that the factory people who store the grey market shoes sell them in small amounts to keep the price they get for them as high as possible. If AR and SDS are buying a few k pairs apiece they are going to get a better price per pair then if they just buy 50-100 units leaked out slowly over time.
But there is still a shroud of mystery that no one knows about, all I know 100% for sure from multiple sources over the years about these grey market shoes is this, which is basically the same stuff said in that article a few pages back:
They are produced in the same factories contracted by Nike at the same time of the production run of the pairs ordered by Nike, with the same materials on the same production lines ( you cant just magically produce a model not currently in production, the lines of all the applicable machinery and workers trained for that model need to be up and running, example: one of these factories cant just start cranking out say AJ8 Aquas right now, the production line is not set up and obviously the materials have not been sourced , if that could happen than Concords would have been produced in perpetuity since it is the most in demand AJ in the US market, they only hit hte grey market when they actually went in production, it must be a model that is actually coming out and has a major order in by Nike, which means the factories have sourced the necessary materials)
Shady characters/organized crime are involved in securing the overrun extra pairs and selling them to people like AR, Marquee, SDS etc.... they all get their shoes from the same source at roughly the same time....whoever pays a premium gets it first
As to the rest of the exact details, we'll probably never know, I could be wrong about the Space Jams, if they have extra soles and black uppers already laying around the factory it is possible they are being produced on the concord production line as the patent panels and midsoles have already been sourced, all they need are the black uppers, laces and soles to change it so space jams, so that is a small possibility but I doubt it. But then again, like I said who knows?
