Buying Chunky Dunks 30% Below Market Price

When these Chunky’s first dropped, the starting price was trending around $1,300 on release day and prior to release date.  That price didn’t last long as prices quickly jumped to $1,800+ USD shortly after the release.  This is a rare scenario that the pre-release price was actually less than the after release prices and this can possibly mean people were sitting on the sidelines hoping to win at retail before jumping on the shoe and paying resell.  Of course the reality is most people won’t win a raffle and for those that did want the shoe was stuck with paying resell.  Well the fact that resell prices after release date ended up being more than pre-release prices means demand is greater than supply.

I won’t lie. This shoe was quite hard to predict in terms of price expectation because with the dunk sb hype going and with this being an extremely wild looking sneaker, it’s really hard to see what the market thinks.  Even though a ton of people are saying it’s a fire sneaker, you have to weigh in what people are actually willing to pay.  These are 2 very different things.  No doubt the price point has been high and I was personally hoping a price dip to $1,000…BUT that never happened. When I’m buying as a business for Netmag I tend to test the waters on release day before going hard because I don’t want to be stuck with high cost pairs and for me if there is value I tend to buy/invest in them.  At first I was buying a few pairs for exactly market at approx $1,350 a day or 2 before release date, but all of a sudden prices shot up on StockX to like $1,800 and more.  At that time I was not willing to pay that much for this shoe so I started looking else where in the market….and long and behold…my favourite platform in Japan actually had a lot of pairs available for still $1,300 and below while the market was in theory $1,800.  As you can see on the week of May 25th, I’ve been buying a lot of pairs below $1,300 USD.  The yen is trading around 1 USD to 105 yen, which is actually $1,238 USD, but I have to factor in a small fee to pay my guy in Japan to help me facilitate the payment and logistics, so that’s about 5%.

So with a $500 USD price difference, I was actually locking in pairs at literally 30% below the theoretical market price.  The only problem I had was being able to secure pairs that are size 10.5 and up.  Most of the pairs I was able to secure were size 8-9.5 US as the quantities in this range was vast.  I actually wanted to cop more pairs in size 11 and up as I see those sizes doing better in the future, but at 30% below market it was hard to turn down.  Though I was able to cop a bunch of pairs below market, the only issue is the shipping is delayed in which I’m unable to get pairs to me here in Canada in a timely manner.  I’m not sure if prices would continue to go up as this one is really hard to say, but the reason why I decided to cop a bunch of pairs is because prices has to drop atleast 25% from $1,800 before I can even start losing money.  With that said, I’m hoping the shipping delay would end soon so we can get more of these pairs in our subscriptions for those that can’t justify paying resell prices.

As a season vet in the resell game you have to be able to look EVERYWHERE and not just one market.  Often times prices are usually consistent but sometimes prices are actually more favourable on a certain platforms than others.  I’m not sure if it’s because of demand or certain taste in sneakers from different cultures, but as a resell business numbers is what we care about only. I mean I like the shoe, but not necessarily a shoe I would personally wear.  Being able to look all over the market and being able to move certain pairs from one market to another is what we call arbitrage opportunities.  In fact Netmag ALL started based on arbitrage opportunities.  It was a lot easier a couple years ago before all the selling platforms emerged because it was hard to determine a market price and often there were large price discrepancies all over the world.  Now that price is a common information across all markets, it would be harder to find these deals, but this Chunky Dunk is a classic example that there could be temporary price discrepancies you can take advantage of…BUT don’t expect these price advantages to last long because I’m certainly not the only one out there searching for them.