I used to work as a developer on a large sneaker site based in the UK (Crooked Tongues). Before then I had just thought of sneakers as something you wear. One of the guys I worked with was heavily into it and since we would get a (heavy) discount he'd suggest pairs to me I should buy purely as an investment. I think the best return I had was nearly quadrupling my money on a pair of Air Jordan 5s.
One of the last projects I worked on at the agency was a book of rare and collectables [1] - I think at one point we had the equivalent of half a million dollars sat behind my desk (the large yellow box in the middle is the Nike "Air Mag" Marty Mc Fly sneaker they mention in the article) [2]. After all this I understood a hell of a lot more that there's money in anything when enough people want it. Sounds obvious, but I didn't fully appreciate it until then. That and the power of marketing to create value out of thin air.
> I understood a hell of a lot more that there's money in anything when enough people want it. Sounds obvious, but I didn't fully appreciate it until then. That and the power of marketing to create value out of thin air.
Interesting! Over the last few years, as popularity has seemingly increased, I've noticed more and more the use of bots to speed up the checkout process and ensure that fans don't miss out on "drops".
Did you see any of this while you were working there, and did you work on anything to try and combat this? Very curious as to whether this is recognised and active measures are put in place to discourage the behaviour.
Nope. Big drop days where always sold out in minutes if that. The main thing we would do is add additional capacity before launch or for certain releases limit the amount in any one particular basket. Other than that we'd ban IPs that were hammering the site but didn't look out for anything automated. If the money cleared for the transaction then we delivered.
We never saw anything particularly weird (like a whole size run shipping to one address) from 2008 - 2013. The site itself ended up sold to ASOS after that and they took it all in-house until they eventually killed it [1].
Within the office and industry, it was "sneakers" everywhere. [1]. All the guys in the office and anyone seriously collecting or lurking on the forums pretty much always said "sneakers". Anyone who wasn't into the scene though would say trainers.
I'm from Northern Ireland, so until I moved to the "mainland" I actually referred to them as "guddies". [2]
I understand Nike's position and the resellers and the entrepreuners - they're all making good money off all this.
But, for the non-investers, those at the end of the chain, I can't even begin to imagine why someone would pay over 5000, or 1000$ or even over 60$ for a pair of shoes. Perhaps, i could understand if it was the top 1% of the income ladder. But, we're talking about middle class buyers right? The very same ones who struggle to pay rent and food, the 65% of the population we keep hearing about who has less than 400$ in savings? Is a pair of shoes more valuable than having a home to live in? I'm confused.
All used deliberate scarcity, a large number of product editions, and rapid product cycles to create a collectors market and ultimately create the impression of value. It is also debatable in each case how organic the growth in desirability of each has been, and how much of this has been engineered by the companies themselves
Are Beanie Babies similar to Magic the Gathering cards?
Fashion sneakers, Beanie Babies, and MtG cards all have had prices inflated above the price for comparable goods (regular sneakers, teddy bears, and regular playing cards), you can say that. Fashion sneakers and MtG cards have had longer runs in popularity than Beanie Babies had and sneakers have more intrinsic value to people than either MtG cards or Beanie Babies do, but they're all different.
You can say that they are all fads, but owning shares of a company, learning a particular programming language, or picking a university to apply to are all subject to waves of popularity that can obscure their value for people as well.
I know. And I even thought about that before I commented, but I don't know how else to ask without three paragraphs of what would basically amount to "I'm not racist, but" clarifications.
It really does seem like a weird bubble, though. Sneakers do have intrinsic value - you can always walk in your collection, which is more than you can say for Beanie Babies or MtG cards - but it's still just a handful of companies producing something whose value stems from arbitrary production restrictions.
Why sneakers? Why not hats or socks?
But I guess it's just arbitrary, like wine, or collectible angel dolls, or that weird fancy cut glass stuff I see in malls whose name escapes me, or comics.
I think there is a whole scene of street fashion which is basically this, but applied to hats, hoodies, and other garments.
Folks like their beautiful (to them) objects and they like to share that with their friends.
I don't think there's any deep answer to the question of why sneakers. The high value may stem to some extent from limited production but it also arises because there's a willing market.
> I think there is a whole scene of street fashion which is basically this, but applied to hats, hoodies, and other garments.
Indeed. /r/streetwear is a fun subreddit for pics. The extremes of that side of fashion (the tech wear stuff, goth ninja, etc) can get really expensive, really quickly.
But if people didn't care about counterfeits, you could make your own cards, right? For any non-collectible card game, noone would care if the cards are "authentic" or not.
This is sort of like the difference between original art and a high-quality replica. Market value has its own logic that's often independent of use-value.
In terms of the lack of supply of older sets/models, when it comes to set a value due to scarcity - I think they are similar.
Limited runs of products with demand, and that have a aesthetic, artistic, or social status value (even though completely subjective) - have potential for this. Namely those with a high nostalgic intrinsic value.
I'm talking more about sneakers and Magic the Gathering - I don't know about beanie babies, but from what I've seen it seems way more fragile than the previous (despite the nostalgia, I think the market must be really small... MTG is still growing and has a huge player base - those have the potential to become investors, or not).
I use to run a super popular sneaker encyclopedia and collected shoes. Mostly lost interest in shoes and then the site slipped from popularity, but it was an interesting time. I had every Nike Dunk colorway name and Air Jordan memorised hah.
I still appreciate nice shoes just as people like art. Some of the sneaker designers like Tinker are truly artists.
I think there is a difference here. With Tulips, all the buyers were people intending to sell at a higher price. Initially, yes people bought them for the product itself. But it came to point where all the buyers were just interested in reselling them. They were buying for price appreciation and not the product itself.
With sneakers it's different because the prices paid are by people interested in the product itself. In that sense this is more like comic books or baseball cards. And these things can keep their high prices indefinitely.
One of the last projects I worked on at the agency was a book of rare and collectables [1] - I think at one point we had the equivalent of half a million dollars sat behind my desk (the large yellow box in the middle is the Nike "Air Mag" Marty Mc Fly sneaker they mention in the article) [2]. After all this I understood a hell of a lot more that there's money in anything when enough people want it. Sounds obvious, but I didn't fully appreciate it until then. That and the power of marketing to create value out of thin air.
[1] http://www.thamesandhudsonusa.com/books/sneakers-the-complet...
[2] https://i.imgur.com/bO6nYts.png