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By 9:35 on a recent Friday night, Dominique Thomas had been camped outside the Niketown store in South Miami for two full days. Thomas, who goes by the street name DK the Line Pimp, had flown in from Denver and was first in line to buy the $100 Cowboy Air Max 180s, which were scheduled to go on sale at 10 that night. Just 140 pairs of these limited-edition sneakers--a hunter green, lizard-skin design with a light pink Swoosh--were manufactured, and they would be sold only at the Miami store and only that night. As a snaking line of mostly young men waited for the doors to open, Thomas, 21, reflected on how much getting the shoes meant to him. "Shoes run my life," he said. "Without shoes, I don't exist."The hot resale market online and in sneaker consignment shops like New York City's Flight Club can make flipping shoes a lucrative side job. Laurent Touma, 31, a financial consultant in Miami, says he makes $1,500 a month buying and selling Nikes and Adidas on eBay, where an original Air Jordan I in metallic blue, which retailed at $65 in 1985, sold for $2,001 in January. "In the vintage business, the sneaker has become like a Rolex," says Touma. As with the watches, counterfeits are rampant, so sneakerheads pitch in on sites like niketalk.com to study pictures posted online to help identify fakes.
Customized sneakers are a hot part of the market. Jordan Price, a graffiti artist based in Brooklyn, N.Y., better known as Jor One, creates unique designs that sell for as much as $1,500 a pair. Price's streetwise styles, which have been featured in "Sneaker Pimps," a traveling exhibit of rare and vintage shoes, include a pattern of cigars and 40-oz. beer bottles, whose labels read, WE SELL TO MINORS & DRUNKS. While Price, 26, uses a paintbrush, Chris Hui, a high school sophomore in Milwaukee, Wis., has gained a national reputation for applying unusual materials such as carbon fiber to sneakers, an idea he got after he saw the flexible composite on the hood of a car. Hui, who goes by the name C2, is something of a celebrity at his school for customizing shoes for people like NBA star LeBron James. Despite his fame, Hui, 16, admits that at heart, he is just another sneakerhead. "Once I get the money," he says, "I always put it back into the shoes."
With reporting by With reporting by Jeanne DeQuine/Miami
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http://www.solepedia
Online Sneaker Encyclopedia.
http://www.shooogle.comSneaker Search Engine
