Re-sell or Rock?  It can be a difficult choice when there is a big Retail vs. Resell Price Gap

When I first popped these bad boys open, I thought I bought a pair of fakes because it had an END receipt in it and I was thrown off because it had a invoice date of 01/20/2017.  Knowing the shoes were released in 2014, it scared the shit out of me thinking the receipt was fake.  I quickly pulled a pair from the back to compare and found nothing wrong with them and I was scratching my head…LOL Then I did some quick research online to find out that…OHHHH right, they had this restock earlier in 2017 and I remember even taking part in the raffle but didn’t get the W.  Then I realized ok, they are legit after all and I was just scaring myself because I paid close to $2k for these.  But this leaves me to my blog today…

To be honest, Fragments 1s was one of the very few shoes that really surprised me in terms of re-sell price movement.  When they first released, the immediate resell price shot up to about $800.  I honestly couldn’t really justify paying that much for a pair of 1s where the logo is barely visible from afar.  I mean the colourway wasn’t absolutely game changing either, so to me it was just like a regular black toe that I could buy for more than half the price.  Then as time passed, they keep going up in price and then I just accepted the fact it’s a shoe EVERYONE wanted.  We probably all recall the whole Marshall come up on these followed by the END restock in 2017. So the big question is…when you come up on a pair for retail price at $185, but resell is like 10 times that price, would you still rock or would you re-sell and use the money elsewhere?  It’s a rather difficult decision to make because 10 times of what you paid is a BIG come up no matter how you look at it and honestly if I hit for retail, I’d be very tempted to sell too because you won’t find a risk free arbitrage return like that anywhere in the financial markets.  Just to put things in perspective…one hand you got 1 pair of DS Frags, but on the other hand it could be 10 pairs of GR Jordan releases…

Everyone has a different opinion on this, but here’s what I would have done.  Given that I didn’t own a pair at that time, I would have instantly sold the pair for resell price and used the money to purchase a slightly pre-owned pair for a fraction of the price.   To me, I actually prefer pre-owned pairs over un-DSing pairs because I rather have the peace of mind of trashing the pair over that initial hump period of rocking new shoes of trying to keep them clean AF.  Don’t get me wrong, the feeling of having fresh kicks to un-DS is great, but not when I can turn 1 pair into 2-3 pairs of the same shoe, it’s an easy choice.  What would you have done?

[VERDICT] – We all have different motives for re-selling.  It could be for money or it could be selling something you don’t want to get something you want.  The term re-seller has been coined negatively in the past few years, but just remember! If there is a seller and a willing buyer, that is just a normal mutual agreement sale that both parties are willing to do.   The seller doesn’t dictate the market prices…rather it’s a equilibrium of both sellers and willing buyers that determine what the market price should be.