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It’s the impact of re-commerce playing out and maturing with sneakers since you now have several platforms to exchange the product in scale. This wasn’t the case just a few years ago. Similar in many ways to Craig’s list on local classifieds. Investors started pouring money into this space once assessments were done on how profitable reselling sneakers was. I’d need to locate some old articles but one I read years ago stated the second most profitable sneaker company to Nike if it was an actual company was reselling sneakers. I don’t think people really understand how large Nike is, nor how much wealth it’s created for its shareholders.
Re-commerce has aggregated and is selling culture. It’s become an asset, which is strange but makes sense at the same time. You almost need to think OG sneakers like coins, or baseball cards, but they’re better because people wear them vs. put them in a case. There is also a lot of money out there to chase assets you can resell.
Re-commerce loves the sneakerhead, so do theses brands that now get to push halo products, collab, limited editions, etc. and use resell to gauge how much people will pay. They want more “sneakerheads” so they can keep pushing the prices further up and generate more profit. Stockx, Goat, retailers like Footlocker (who I believe invested in Goat), brands Like NB, Nike, Adi, etc.....they all need each other. And it’s not just sneakers. Sneakers pull in their other products, shirts, hats, etc.
It’s a business man, get used to it until something happens and it crashes.
Exactly. I may also note that, this is my theory, if these special editions were priced to their market value from the get-go, we wouldn't get this problem. A lot of collabs are essentially snatched up by the rich, they're not really being worn by the "true sneakerheads" anymore because sneakers are woven into fashion, and many workplaces allow more casual attire, making sneakers ever more noticeable.
You then would ask, why doesn't Nike then price their Travis Scott AJ 1's to be $500US? Because it's not worth their time. For you or me pricing it higher is a lot more money for us, for a company the scale of Nike? Absolutely not worth their while. This is one of the reasons I'm looking to buy say LV / Chanel sneakers vs paying resell. If my goal is to signal that I got money, then I rather pay the $ and get some much higher quality sneakers than Nike/Adidas