Price Expectation – OFF White Presto 2018

Following the successful highly sought after Presto the Ten, Nike and Virgil decided to drop a second version of the off white presto in black and white. At first I was super amped for this release because I was a fan of these because of the simplicity of the shoe and at the end of the day you know i’m a fan of buying expensive items to wear and selling them for what i paid OR even more a few years down the road.  I was super hyped for the white pair because personally anything white low top is up my ally.  I wasn’t so high on the black pair initially, but my thoughts have changed drastically since.  In terms of re-sell price they are trending exactly where I predicted.

Around release date I was offered an opportunity to buy bulk on the prestos but the price the seller was asking was way more than what I wanted to pay.  I think the biggest problem for re-sellers in this release was everyone was so benchmarked to the original pair and it’s resell price.  The first original pair was cool and different and more importantly MUCH MORE LIMITED! It was the unanimous top 1 or 2 pair from the entire TEN and hence why we saw re-sell prices up there because demand for that pair was way up there as well.  So when this black and white pair being released less than 1 year later most people expect the re-sell prices to JUMP.  Of course the price will definitely more than retail, but it won’t be as crazy as the first pair.  One namely because now the consumer can choose from 2 colours of the same pair and second…there were more quantities dropped per colour relative to the original pair

With that said, I ended up only buying 5 pairs each at resell because I didn’t believe prices will go up so quickly, but I just needed pairs to make available for our $11 gift card members.  At first I was expecting the white pair to do better in terms of resell price than the black pair and originally I wanted the white pair over the black pair for personal use.  Then I realized that it would be extremely difficult to clean because of the material so I actually switched and wanted the black pair instead because it was easier to manage.  I mean normal white shoes i could clean easily, but these would be a difficult task.  I’m not sure if that’s what every consumer had in mind as well, but originally they were both re-selling at the same price and now the black pair is clearly selling at a larger margin than the white….who knows…maybe?

Where are prices heading for these?  At the end of the day…these are still pretty limited in terms of quantity and as long as Off White remains up there in the food chain, I think demand will always be there.  But I honestly don’t seeing these going over $1,000 in resell in the next couple months.  Simply speaking there are still tons of Off White Nike shoes in the pipeline and how many pairs can the average consumer keep up with?  Everyone soon needs to rationalize on which pair they really want and I think with that in mind everyone would elect to choose the new and upcoming releases.  Personally I think these are a must have, but ALSO one of those pairs I could pass on because for plain normal black or white shoes…there are just so many more options out there for the average consumer.  Ultimately the average consumer would ask…why am I paying 6-7 times the average shoe price for something so simple?  For re-sellers that bet BIG on this release (especially the white pair) might be hurting a little right now because it actually dropped quite a bit in price from close to $700 to $600 (that’s about 14% drop) AND if you mulitply that with 20 pairs…that’s a material amount of deadweight one might have to hold on to in terms of opportunity cost.

VERDICT – This release was a classic example of using past history of prices alone is not enough to make you successful.  You need to look MORE outside of the box because you need to factor in many factors as well to make an even more educated guess of how the market will react and this is where experience comes into play.  One can’t learn from experience unless you live through it and that is why some re-sellers do it better than others.