What If Fragment 1s Didn’t Have Fragment?

If you’ve been in the sneaker game for many years, you should know one fundamental concept really well.  That is …

SUBTLE DIFFERENCES CAN TRANSLATE INTO MAJOR PRICE DIFFERENCES

When the Fragment 1s first came out, it was an easy pass for me because the re-sell price right off the bat was like $800.  This was pretty absurd at the time given the colourway wasn’t very special and the fact that past fragment releases (ie, dunk highs, air force 1s) didn’t really do too well on the re-sell market.  For me, if i’m paying that much for a new release it either better have crazy good material or it must be super limited.  This was neither when they first released.  I mean you could argue they were limited, but it wasn’t one of those 1 of 200 pairs in the world.  In hindsight, I would have made a killing if I hoarded pairs of these when they first dropped, but then again you can’t always win and be right.

But the question today is what if these were released without the fragment association. What would re-sell price be today?  Don’t answer…because it was meant to be rhetorical and the answer is quite obvious.  But rather, what can we learn from this release? Regardless if you are a re-seller or true sneakerhead, we all want to buy something that appreciates in value.  Re-seller in the sense we can make profit in the future and sneakerhead in the sense we can wear them and still get our money back when we eventually sell it, which essentially means wearing the shoes for free.  We all don’t want to lose money.   For me, I was definitely wrong on passing on these in 2014-2015, but this just means its a perfect time to review why I was wrong on my decision.

1. Though the fragment logo was small and barely visible from afar, I failed to ration that releases like these usually never gets a retro treatment like many non-collaborative Jordan releases.  Why I was skeptical because this was released during a time when the 2001 BRED and ROYALS were fetching sky high prices all of a sudden ($700-$800).  I was extremely skeptical of prices on these during the time for a few reasons, BUT for the record – I WAS ABSOLUTELY BANG ON with my expectation on the 01s and that I predicted prices would fall hard…and fast forward to 2017, that’s exactly what happened.  Given the fact that these fragment 1s probably will never retro in the future, this is a prime candidate for high re-sell prices in the future.
2. Even though the colourway was unique and released for the first time in history, I was initially skeptical that if they released the same version of these without the fragment logo it would hurt re-sell value of the fragment 1s.  Yet again, I failed to ration that even though they released the same colourway without the logo, it would NOT create downward pressure to re-sell prices of the frag 1s.  Why?  This circles back to the concept that we all want to own and wear exclusive sneakers and be different from others.  In other words, FLEX for the gram! So if I wore the same shoe without the logo, people are more than likely to term it the “poor man frags”.  So given that we all don’t want to be the average Joe wearing poor man frags, we would STILL desire the fragment version.  With that said, prices would probably be unaffected at all.  Need another example to back this point up?  Jordan “fragment” 1.5s….say no more 🙂

All in all, i’m not god and I can’t predict every price increase correctly.  The best I can do is predict price movements correctly MOST of the time and that’ll be enough to keep me in the game of re-selling for the indefinite future.  For some of those that are reading this, you are probably thinking in your head…oh yeah i knew prices would have went up, this was an easy one to guess…That’s cool…you had 50% chance of getting it right because its either UP or DOWN, but its meaningless if you don’t put your money where you mouth is at.  For me, I don’t dwell on my correct predictions…but rather I concentrate really hard on my wrong predictions so that next time something similar comes up in the future i’m ready while most are still second guessing.