How Stadium Goods' John McPheters Created A Sneaker Consignment Empire | Blueprint

[Music] entrepreneur ecommerce expert and sneaker kingpin John McPheeters help bring the consignment model to Footwear and then leveled up by launching his own store stadium goods this is his blueprint you grew up in New York City how did that inform your sort of attitude towards entrepreneurialism I was like that classic New York kid you know I was really into hip-hop and sneakers and graffiti in the mid 90s all that together kind of shaped a lot of where I went directionally you can't survive in New York with just one hustle so I always was going after new income streams and new revenue sources since I was a little leaving high school going to college did you have much of a sense of professional purpose I went to school for advertising you know I always worked hard and tried to get interesting jobs and internships but I had no idea where I was going one of the first jobs that you get out of school I didn't have a gig lined up I was out of school I just kind of was looking for a fresh start so I decided I was gonna move to Japan and try it out it was the perfect time I didn't have any responsibilities there was nothing that I had to live up to at the time so I got a job at Def Jam Japan how did you make that connection I literally just walked up into the Def Jam office and acted like I was supposed to be there walked right past security up the elevator into the office and by the time I'm like center-mass in the middle of the office there's people there that I kind of made my pitch to a month and a half later one of the guys that I spoke to was leaving and he needed someone that could speak English to be on the team so he slotted me in there was a lot about it that was really sexy to me from a cultural standpoint you know like they had us hip-hop artists that were going out there and they they had all these Japanese artists that they were developing it was very much an intersection of a bunch of different cultures kind of happening at once it was at this time when Street where in Tokyo was just booming the height of the bathing ape moment when nigo was killing it you know I got to meet him and kind of see that as like wow these guys are these guys are doing it like they've made something really special such an iconic brand to see it see the lines around the block for kids waiting for product just every single thing selling out in a heartbeat that was really what lit my fire in a lot of ways to go after something bigger what brought you back to the States it's very difficult to see that to the end somewhere because you're not in your it's like no home court advantage you know everything is a fight and a learning and trying to figure something out you have a much better shot at succeeding where you're from and where your relationships are from you start working at a handful of different companies including flight club team epiphany with Coltrane and a couple of you know how do you get your sort of fingers into each one of these businesses flight Club was more relationship driven I knew a lot of the guys that were over there and was kind of in the mix from the inception in some way shape or form with team epiphany I got lucky a good friend of mine took me over there and let me let me make the pitch and they gave me the project to run for that first one very quickly I took to it and had a bunch more projects after that and ended up just kind of growing with them as they grew you are sort of Cobble linked together a very piecemeal existence what gave you the confidence to feel like this was all going to work out at the end of the Moho I personally take no solace in a nine-to-five in my mind I have to be steering my own destiny I was always trying to find a million things to work on until I got to a place where I felt comfortable at flay Club tell me about what you took on from a responsibility standpoint I kind of left the team epiphany thing at one point and decided to go all heartedly in that direction I felt like I could be a real asset in terms of growing the business whether it was seizing opportunities that weren't being seized or just driving and hammering behind the business to try to grow it faster at what point do you decide this is great and I love fly club and what we've been doing here but I need to do it for myself I was very lucky in that my current partner Jed Stiller and I we were involved in a project it was called super mobile sold to Groupon it provided us that opportunity to have a little extra money in our pockets made me feel secure enough with with with a child on the way that I could go off and really try to figure out what that next project was gonna be you sort of have these pivotal moments in life where you realize that you need to change directions and I saw myself starting a family I saw kind of what that next round of life was going to be and I didn't feel like I had the control that I wanted to have in life at the time when I made that move Stadium Goods wasn't an idea you know it was what are we gonna do I knew that Jed was gonna be the right partner for me on a bunch of levels and yeah we just decided that we were gonna hunker down and figure out what that next play was once you have the family and the kids and everything's lined up it's a lot harder to make a jump like that it was all kind of happening in tandem but the time was really then for for me to go out and do my own thing after cutting his teeth and other people's operations McPheeters was ready to go out on his own he just needed the right idea what is day one step one you would jet are sitting in a room what is literally the first Dignan twin does a lot of brainstorming around a deck kind of like distilling it down to an idea we had some strong minds that were kind of like around us at the time that we would throw things off to get feedback lucky Ming will as an example like he was he was always very helpful when we were going through this process a lot of other people in the sneaker space said you have to do a raise to open the store open the e-comm yeah how does that work Jed my I mean he's but he's my main partner but he handles all that type of stuff thankfully and I'm glad he does because he's a lot better at that type of stuff than me whether it's selling it in to investors pitching the financials of the business kind of how how the operating capital is gonna work that type of stuff so he was able to bring in that money when it was just a presentation in the deck I've always played a decisive role in like steering what that business vision is I think a big part of why we're doing so well is that you can't do everything you need to have kind of like your yin to your yang and he's provided that you're getting ready to launch stadium goods what is the rationale that you are deciding to launch a brick-and-mortar store there's a bunch of reasons why we needed a brick-and-mortar one was to host intake and have a place that people could bring stuff and drop it off to was create this picture of what our brand was I mean a lot of that is the walls and the lights and the the neon things that you can only really present through brick and mortar in this day and age there's so many people trying to do the next tech thing but for us we wanted something that people could connect with and see and understand who we were when you were looking at this space you know what were the most important things you know aesthetically that you wanted to establish the brand of Stadium blitz the high ceilings I think we're pretty important we also needed a space that we could white box where we could make it look really really clean this was all brown brick before we painted it good train access tons of trains right here on Canal we needed something we could really craft a nice presentation for from day one that you open the doors and you open the website what's the runway look like based on that first raise it was a million dollars on the first round which might sound like a lot but when you're looking at brick and mortar and Soho to build out website and it's getting the staff and the product together it's how many employees are you talking about and we started it was probably about 30 I'd say had not kind of like cutting hair on our own barber shop getting a lot of that work done really small team is it just off to the races from day one we thought it was gonna be off to the races from day one it was it was definitely not you opened the door as you kind of wait for people to come in and shop and wasn't quite what we expected we were always going really hard on the website and knew that that was where bulk of the business was gonna come from but we expected more from the store in the beginning and that was it was sort of like an awakening like wow we've kind of got to go about this a different way what that meant to us was that we needed to really double down and think about how we were going to do things differently we really dug in and got a lot heavier with the content we also started looking at new ways to to build our name locally from our name locally just get more people in the door how does one put together the initial inventory for a consignment store that has not yet existed it's a big challenge and I mean when we opened we probably had 2,000 styles on the wall which might sound like a lot but it wasn't a lot of that was relationships and getting people to trust us enough to give us that product early when you don't really know when you're gonna be open to sell because you have to have it ahead of time we were very happily surprised at how quickly the actual intake picked up like in that same instance when we're trying to figure out how we get more traffic into the store you know there wasn't there was a line out the door on the consignment side people are just bringing product left and right I think that was part of our growth process was understanding that there was a good amount of product out there and that if we treated people right we could get access to more while we still focus on that to this day a lot more of it is community based people just bringing stuff to us that they want to sell what are just the most expensive sneakers that you have them think right now it is an M&M Jordan for twenty three thousand one sticker in terms of volume the ytz is number which is our new highest volume in terms of dollars sold on a shoe so at the top this year you raised about five million dollars and you added on Mark Cuban among other people as an advisor what was the auspice that pushed you to want to do that second round of raise to grow a business once you kind of have the nuts and bolts of it down you you need capital if you really want to make a big name we realized that we were very short from a headcount standpoint and we knew we need more money if we really wanted to scale I think a lot of people saw what that opportunity was from the standpoint of disrupting retail and seeing it as this bigger vision that we were presenting and that helped us get money in the door you're on track to do slightly over a hundred million this year one hundred fifteen fifteen what do you think the ceiling is for this business I mean I don't honestly I think things go right it could be three for 500 million next year it could get to a billion what are the the dominoes that have to fall to get you to a billion dollars there's always going to be people that buy sneakers there's always gonna be brands that make product there's always gonna be in efficiencies in the market to exploit I don't think we've really realized anything close to what our potential is overseas so we just want to focus focus in on that and continue driving down that road as long as we stay lean and we move quick then I don't think there's an end to it John's early work experience in Asia would come in handy as he set his sights on the strategic expansion of stadium goods so we're in the basement of stadium Goods is this all of your inventory um no this is uh this is actually a pretty small part of the inventory we have our own off-site warehouse where the bulk of it is if you had to Ballpark it how many pairs of shoes do you have in your possession on any given Tuesday I would guess we're creeping up on about 100,000 pairs so that's a lot of individual items to keep track of yeah it is you talked about the international component of the business I know after about a year you guys got in touch with Alibaba and jackman those guys in China who are basically the Amazon of China you know how do they reach out and what is the nature of that relationship so we reached out to them you see something you want you try to go after it and it took a lot of persistence to getting in the door and getting some of those relationships going so I think they saw a couple scrappy guys that were really making it happen and making some some big strides they thought that we could fit in there and gave us access and let us get in there and do our thing is the taste palate in China comparable to the taste Balaton in America like do they want the same products kids all around the world want the same thing if someone posts a photo of a celebrity wearing a shoe you know that's what they're gonna want everywhere what is your ultimate goal for the business it's really hard to know at this point I think we're still very much the horse with the blinders on just trying to get through and maintain the direction and the trajectory and do right by our customers and our sellers in this day and age that's there are a lot of those outcomes that could take place you can get acquired you you could IPO you could create some kind of long lasting partnership I don't think we necessarily know what direction we would go we just were trying to stay true to who we are and keep rockin as a man in his late 30s with a child and a wife I have to ask I know that you're still working 10 12 14 hour days how much longer can you do that you know I've been able to get the Sundays back and the Saturdays are creeping up it's still a very feverish pace a lot of it comes down to time management and being able to spend the time or the time that I would like to with with Macs and menus and making sure that we can still be that family I do the mornings like seven days a week I'm the wake up guy the breakfast guy no matter what's going on I still try to get home it's a balance it's it's really stressful I don't know how much how many more years it can kind of go at that pace you had pains and lots of different thoughts so you've had to centralize all of your energies and activities into one business two years in how do you feel about that pretty significant change in lifestyle I feel great you know I feel I feel proud and happy in a lot of ways I doesn't feel scared and like there's a lot of anxiety part of having all those hustles early on it's what kept me comfortable taking risks on things that I was interested in I think part of getting to where I was comfortable taking this leap of faith in this risk was making sure that I had the stomach for it making sure that I had some resources to fall back on but I had a good amount of time to figure it out if things didn't go our way it's been a great road we've come a really long way in a very short period of time great people you know very excited to be here and happy for how it's going [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you [Music] [Music]

Channel: Complex

Views: 179,519

Rating: 4.9329433 out of 5

Keywords: sneakerhead, complex, complex originals, sneakers, news, entertainment, current affairs, young man, culture, cool, edgy, funny, complex tv, complex media, stadium goods, consignment, soho, nyc, miss info, flight club, resale, eminem jordans, yeezys, japan, def jam, jack ma, alibaba, mark cuban, yu-ming wu, john mcpheters, Noah Callahan-Bever

Id: CEi-_49QTBE

Length: 15min 41sec (941 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 18 2017