There is Flight Club, There is StockX, There is Goat and There is YOU!

Sneakers is a lucrative market. It taps into a big range of demographics that have money to spare. Flight club has been the biggest established business that runs entirely on a re-sell/consignment model that pretty much set the blue print for the industry over the years. Then came along stockX which they are trying to establish itself as the stock market of “things”. What do these 2 companies have in common? They both ONLY SELL BRAND NEW DS shoes – so if they are not brand new you can’t sell them there…and for StockX if your shoes don’t smell or taste brand new, don’t even think about sending them your shoes to sell…and NO I am not joking LOL. Then there is GOAT that tries to fill in the gap by doing Brand new and Used shoes. So what point am I trying to get at today?

Limited and highly coveted sneakers is a very interesting commodity. Whenever I talk to anyone that have no idea about sneakers they ask me why would anyone want to wear sneakers that have been worn by someone else before? My answer would be…because they are limited! In my opinion, in terms of activity and reselling opportunities, preowned sneakers IS MUCH MORE LUCRATIVE than brand new sneakers. If you understand the culture and use a little a bit of economic theory it’s not that hard to figure out. Let’s take the Sean Wotherspoon Air Max 1/97 as an example. Let’s just say there are only 1,000 pairs released to the public. Let’s say half the people decide to resell it (500 pairs) on StockX /Flight club/Goat and half the people that get it for retail goes straight to feet (500 pairs). Let’s assume half the people that buy it at resell decide to un-DS them (250 pairs) and half of them decides to keep them on ice (250 pairs). That only leaves 250 pairs left that are eligible to resell on StockX and FC in the future.

Let’s say people want to buy a pair 1 year later, what are their options? DS prices on stockX and FC would probably be $1,000 and at that point as a consumer you would probably be like do I want to pay premium for a DS pair or should I pay 30% less for a near DS pair. I can tell you a lot of us would probably want to pay 30% less because most of us that want a pair at that point just simply want to wear them. You won’t find pre-owned pairs on StockX and FC because they only deal with DS pairs so where do you look? Exactly….StockX and FC and even Goat just make up a very small market share of the big lucrative market. Small players and pre-owned shoes actually collectively make up a BIG chunk of the pie. Just think about it…as each day goes by there is less and less of DS pairs available on the market. Used shoes probably get flipped 5-10 times over a life span or even more but the same shoe can only be flipped ONCE on stockX and FC. So if you are planning to start a re-sell business, don’t be discouraged by big players. Just know that collective small players make up a bigger chunk of the pie and most importantly and I must stress….You probably have much more knowledge than most employees working at StockX to out play them in a different aspect of the resell game.