Everything You Need to Know About Sneaker Resell Culture

this is like a cutthroat business of I'm selling this for a hundred bucks and you know for example right and the next person gets something for ninety five bucks right so I just put in so much work and these guys are gonna come and do that to me or just fake bills the people that gonna try to rob you stab you these are assets and people are after them people going to try to come and get you [Music] sneakers have never been in higher demand than they are right now and that means money reselling sneakers as we know it today to cash out on increased demand started as a side hustle for a few select kids a decade ago but is now a billion dollar business if you haven't gotten in already you might have missed the wave but that doesn't mean it's over there's a ton of money to be had the only question is can you hack it [Music] welcome to from the ground up I'm your host Pete Forrester and this episode we are looking at reselling we've talked about reselling a lot our previous shows of the drop and flips and bricks got into the nitty-gritty of this sometimes opaque practice but today we're going to get a little more personal with people who resell and how it affects the industry at large both Tyler Blake and BK are knee-deep in reselling culture doing it themselves and facilitating the practice for others over the course of their careers few better our position to recognize all the moving pieces what up guys I'm here with BK influencer extraordinaire and Tyler Blake marketing consultant these are fancy titles but I'm sure you guys have seen them around on the gram and other places so we're talking about reselling today do you guys think I mean just a couple years ago reselling was at least from a retail point of view it was a it was a four-letter word you know it was like something that people weren't proud of doing you couldn't really talk about it if you went to a store but now I think everything has changed and it's sort of a respectable way to make money what do you guys think to be honest I don't think that much has changed it's just the way in which people do it has change you know the days of people kind of lining up behind stores exchanging money from certain areas now I think a lot of its just kind of moved online right retailers have pulled away from doing stuff first-come first-serve it's too dangerous now you have these digital raffle systems so now the reseller who is out you know outdoors hustling still exists but a lot of times some kid be on his computer that's running proxies and BOTS and everything like that kind of controlling all the online stock so it's definitely change but I think it's become a lot more prevalent everyone's doing it you know everyone's hustling everyone's selling their own BOTS whatever it is so it's a lot of consumers reselling will always be a four-letter word there are those people out there that are just real sneaker enthusiasts they're collectors they don't like paying resale but it's just something that now that people have caught on that almost anything will resell that there was already a market there for sneaker being resold before the hype really was they now it's just more of like a a system where people who have access have an easier time getting to those who have the want for the product or just the disposable income just to buy it just because they want to what's up guys I'm here with Eric Pavone from rare pair owner right awesome thanks for having us so what you guys do here is you allow people to come in and sell their product through you correct like we consign shoes where we buy the shoes directly from the person okay and then a tear out the market so do you consider yourselves as a store like a reselling store or hell yeah yeah yeah course as the game all right as the whole point of this this is where people come to get so they can't get out anywhere else have you ever had any problems with any retailers or brands who have sort of oh yeah yeah we were the first store without red Octobers they know their legal department coalesced right and they told us to get rid of that stuff blah blah blah it's not supposed to be in the market right and then like a few weeks later they dropped it like that I don't know but other than that since we don't have an account with any retailers or any brands pretty much whatever the we want that's what I was gonna say it's like because Nike can call you but like what is that what's the threat show me something we sort of talked earlier about what your what the weirdest thing was but yeah show me something that you got that's crazy that people wouldn't expect when they come in here oh I mean when they come into like a basement you they're not even expecting to see anything at all so when they walk in the officially not a waterfall yeah a water 4x8 right I don't think people expect to find see like like this in a basement and the most offensive shooting like around here so before you guys were here I know that there was a debased or there was another sneaker store here before okay whose kicks Luci and you were reselling before not at all no not at all over so how does how does that start for you how are you like it didn't oh I was in between a semesters for college yeah and when they always just no weed in my home and he was like yo you won't open its work with me had mentioned it and I just had a room full of sneakers I had no clue how to how this work no idea I just used to buy sneakers for me so I had no idea how anything any others work so anyone can become a professional reseller basically over yeah yeah right away you can you just gotta want to do it what what I think people don't understand is that there's a lot of work involved for certain shoes you have to go through a lot of to get them you have to maybe bribe from security guard some employees camp out overnight you know so when you're paying resale you're paying for it somebody's labor somebody's extra work what was what was something you didn't expect about this business before you came into it how many grimy people are interested this is like not easy this is like there's not a friendly environment for anybody so when people sell like unhappy or people put shoes in stores they're not dealing with a customer anybody that works retailing relief I would had many jobs I can really with everybody this is like a cutthroat business of I'm selling this for 100 bucks and you know for example right and the next person goes only for 95 bucks right so I just put in so much work and as you're gonna come and do extra tweak or just fake bills and people they're gonna try to rob you stab you these are assets and people right after them people gonna try to come you give you how do you think Riesling has changed the way that brands operate and the way retailers operate I mean they're just influenced it for the brands if you stand on the block the same block has to be plugging somebody on the line they'll kick your friend out of the line but that whole brand is based on sweets all right so it's like oh we don't want it but we want it the brand's need it Nike needs it a deed of these that everybody needs it so they'll have like bait shoes that I call bait shoes they're really something really really hot in the colorway make it unattainable to 90% of the world 95 99 percent of the world and then they'll release something very similar to in like a few weeks later and well you can get this one they're sending the really rare shoots to the youtubers with like millions of followers so they need those people now I don't think people care about the shoes because everyone need to be sorry for kind of embarrassing actually like in two and a half so I see people making like 10 20 dollars above details now one of those people like to go die go sucks like like you guys are like not recently that's not recently you guys are go get a job you guys want to make ten twenty dollars like Addie but that you guys are ruining it for everybody if you guys want to resell you guys are gonna see what's gonna happen on the apps because all those really low prices are not gonna last a long time they're gonna learn eventually like I'm gonna give it maybe a few months before the people making like chump change start making real money because it's there they just have to be a little bit more patient [Music] special edition sneakers are now only released behind a litany of barriers they're put out in very limited numbers and often at only a few stores who have their own raffle systems or hoops to jump through for purchase with those restrictions comes added values these shoes are worth more than the retail price before they even drop because the demand are outweigh the supply and there are always collectors willing to pay that demand means customers are willing to wait outside sometimes for weeks at a time just to secure their pairs retailers have followed these trends and countered the practices that's out lawn camping a raffle systems in person or online law enforcement in some cities like New York monitor The Situation's routinely shut them down before it got out of hand as it did it was often just a couple kids spending a few nights together in a type of brotherhood hi somebody's oh and George ocampo has a primer for us on how this small community turned into something that attracted the sights of Billy long before the internet turned reselling into something everyone can jump on we saw the first signs of reselling in metropolitan cities like New York as local mom-and-pop sneaker shops in the 90s started to become keen to the level of the man that was around their Footwear they started to bend the rules a little bit selling height pairs under the table and back door to locals before the shoes actual release dates and they did this all in premium of course meaning kind of had throw some cash to grease your pan out the door if you know what I'm saying although it might sound a little shady the situation made sense to ease the financial burdens of these local retailers suffering under the press a big chain stores while offering peace of mind to regulars who really just wanted a pair of sneakers anyway Nike was not really fond of this and began pulling accounts at suspected retailers further driving this exclusive and elusive nature of the sneaker game on the flip side sneaker obsessed consumers were always just looking out for themselves and for good reason you've ever gone home empty-handed after a sneaker release you know that it totally sucks and pretty much makes you want to do everything and to make sure it never happens again and this is kind of how the sneaker reselling community began to take shape competing with overwhelming demand sneakerheads had to figure out how to not just secure one pair for themselves but you know a second pair to stock and then a third pair for the homie that had work that day and then a fourth pair for you know reselling because you just drop money on like three pairs of sneakers and you probably need to make some money back it wasn't really making about big bucks but you definitely needed money to play the game and that was kind of how you leveled up stacked of cash and got the pair that you really wanted it's technology evolved in the internet connected the world at the turn of the century the sneaker market really blossomed not only over fans able to follow what went down in different cities but they also had new access to products that they never even saw before through platforms like eBay and forms like Nike Talk and ISS all of a sudden sneakerheads in like Chicago we're seeing never-before-seen airmax colorways that were exclusive to Europe or like crazy Asia exclusive releases and the only way to get a sneakerhead overseas to help you out was to either pay them the right price or you know have something of equal value to trade them further feeding into this sneaker after market situation for any of these online communities to live consignment stores like flight Club began popping up in the mid to thousands to give us the blueprint for physical retail completely built on reselling pairs from successful sneaker heads these one-stop shops for rare feats would attract true fans celebrities and tourists while the business model answered a lot of questions for both resellers and buyers at the time there were a lot of sb dunks Jordan Pease and Yeezys that can demand some serious price tags and a middleman Authority would really help make everyone feel better about the whole thing this consignment model soon made its way to digital as online platforms like goat and stock Tech's offered the same authentication services to the sneaker heads across the globe allowing kids who didn't happen to live near a griffore stadium goods to buy and sell easy 350s with confidence from the comfort of their own bedroom all these reselling tools combined with the brand's seemingly endless barrage of collaborations new models and other exciting capsules and releases has mates reselling sneakers reach an all-time peak right now and is truly a viable option for fans all over the globe even just a few years ago the sneaker community was relatively limited you might be able to find a home for a few dozen pairs of a very limited edition sneaker you grabbed but now in 2018 anyone looking to flip pairs for some extra money can have a ton of product sometimes hundreds of pairs at a time to make that happen resellers have to form relationships with retailers so they can secure all those pairs or even figure out some strange alternatives I sat down with my friend Gerard Clarke who used to manage gifts Brooklyn location and then worked at the Adidas store in Soho to get some insight on how reselling looks from the retailer's point of view what's up guys we are here with Gerard Clarke formerly of Keith and Adidas and now a consultant in his own right thank you for joining us so you started in retail sneaker retail before reselling so really popped off to be what it is today and have been there as its gone from like a four letter word nobody wants to give anything admit the fact that they're a reseller and now people are building businesses off of it um can you sort of give us a rough timeline or like rough sort of experience of what it was like to see how it changed from my experience always being in that stage of sneaker culture I feel like it started with Isis slowly gathering but more people are like trading shoes on there some people that you could just buy it right out but it was not all reselling it wasn't called it was like I had a shoe I'm not wearing it I just got rid of it for a price or I traded it for something better he had what i want i like what i want when i got into retail when I got into kif it was more like I'm buying a shoe to just sell it to me get profit and it kept going to that extreme some shoes did better than others and we just felt like it was always on the negative it was always on the unspoken like that guy feel like does it that guy maybe does it right I don't know we're not gonna label anybody you don't want to know ya don't know don't want to label anybody and it just became really aggressive how did that how did it sort of change the way that a store or your stories of interacted with customers going from reselling isn't much of a thing to now this is why people are coming to this store how does it change your relationship with those customers um it changes your mindset really fast because you don't know some people are genuine and then some people aren't some people would tell you the truth like I just need a shoe too for a bit and then some people are really like beating around the bush so when we work together there was a conversation that was happening behind the scenes which there was some frustration at the brand resellers were making more money off the product then we were making a propellant right so if we were selling something for 150 bucks and resellers were selling it for $400 a guy who didn't work on the project you know who didn't do any of the marketing or anything strolls up or you know at most weights a week in line on a project that we had worked on for a year it makes $250 whereas we're making $75 where do you land in that conversation margins are difficult to figure out but you always have to even raising the price you're not you're gonna make more money yourself but they're still gonna make more money and then it's supply and demand more people want it more people after it the higher the price go go so where you win you're gonna start a super thin under dollars and then someone said six seven eight you make 250 now they are still making five you're never gonna win into that margin error it's just a game what are you gonna do are you gonna shoot yourself you can sell it yourself maybe then you get your money then you need your money thank you so much for coming through thank you if you wanted to buy or sell something in the after market it used to be the Wild West out there resellers could use message boards or sites like Craigslist or Ebay to sell their products and anyone could basically charge anything they wanted for whatever they had there was no such thing as a real street value since there was no regulation until Josh Luber started campus that would later morph into stock X it was impossible to really track what a fair price for a pair of shoes was this was good and bad if you were reselling you could pull one over on a chump make some extra money if you were a buyer you could get a steal but the opposite is also true a buyer might get hosed on overpriced shoes or fake product or a seller can get a charge back or some other scam but now in stores like flight Club and rare pair can act as a middleman to ensure fair prices and authenticity that's it for this episode of from the ground up if you enjoyed this episode we want to hear from you comment below with the rarest pay of sneakers you ever bought on resale or resold yourself and while you're there don't forget to Like and subscribe and check out past episodes like the episode about customs and our debate on air max change until then keep it fresh [Music]

Channel: Highsnobiety

Views: 449,096

Rating: 4.8671546 out of 5

Keywords: highsnobiety, lifestyle, fashion, streetwear, culture, travel, sneakers, footwear, videography, style, pop-culture, Sneaker pron, resale, news, trends, now, hot, nike, adidas, Puma, Vapor, Jordans, air force, boost, supreme, bape, tyler blake, comme de garcons, palace, Rare pare, history, documentary, interview, NMD, Pharrel, real talk, grailed, snkrs, sneakerhead, hypebeast

Id: _RcEqhKa5Ho

Length: 17min 45sec (1065 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 27 2018