To be fair to Yeezys they are literally the most comfortable pair of shoes I've ever worn in my life. I'm embarrassed to wear my very first pair out in public after they got dripped on by some black gunk from the el train tracks that couldn't even be bleached out but they are serving me very well as indoor shoes and on my treadmill. I own multiple other pairs now so I also feel less bad only wearing those inside.<p>With all the hype now I think Adidas is actually positioned very well to eventually supplant Nike in the market place. Shoe prices keep going up but Adidas has invested in a new tech that is incredible to wear to justify the cost while combining it with high end fashion.<p>I was very much in to sneakers growing up and can probably count on one hand the number of non Nike sneakers I ever bought during that time period. Jordans keep going up in price but every single pair I've bought in the past five to ten years has been cheap junk with paint that chips, soles that disintegrate and detach, and just extremely cheap build quality. I've been wearing Jordans for almost my entire life (there are toddler photos of me with a pair of 4s on) and they were my favorite type of sneaker during high school and college. There is a stark difference in the quality. I have a pair of 1s I bought in 2008 I still wear regularly, where as the last pair I bought developed a hole in the bottom after 2 years of use.<p>This is combined with the massive difference in the marketplace for buying their sneakers. When I was in college I went to exactly one Jordan sneaker drop and the police ended up needing to be called and I was totally turned off to the idea forever. Nike and Adidas run their drops very differently for the most part nowadays, although Yeezy Supply occasionally will backtrack. On Yeezysupply, the Adidas app, and the Adidas confirm app they've mostly settled into a flow where they let you know a week ahead of time a sneaker is coming out, you register your information ahead of time, they do a charge and refund to your card to verify it and then at 9:05 about on release day you get a congratulations notification or a so sorry notification from a random drawing. Before covid they would occasionally also do drops based on GPS location that make you have to goto the store for a guaranteed pair but no guarantee of your size so you'd still have to wait in line, which was extremely annoying but all the sneakers are atleast 1.5x increase in price immediately on release so you could always sell for a small profit to sometimes larger profit.<p>On the Nike SNKR app you get all the stress of waiting in line from the comfort of your home, you need to monitor the app for shoes with a pending release so you can register for notifications. On the day of you should have atleast two devices like a phone and tablet. The Android app is poorly programmed in comparison to the iOS app for no real reason other than it was farmed out to a bad consulting agency. You need to have all your credit card information saved ahead of time and your verification code memorized. A minute before you need to start tapping the disabled button or monitor www.time.gov. You get into the buy flow and have to read quickly to find your size, enter your memorized verification number, and you wait an arbitrary amount of time for the app to tell you that you if you're getting a pair or not. All these tips I've read and applied but have never actually gotten a pair of sneakers I've wanted from the app. I still buy multiple pairs of sneakers a year, but I have bought one single pair of Nikes in the past few years because the company has made it so difficult for me to give them money.<p>I believe Nike is living and existing off their former glory when it comes to the sneaker head community. I only ever bother with Nike at this point for classic designs that came out in the 80s and 90s that have been redone in a unique way, such as their collaborations with Virgil and other high end fashion designers. I refuse to pay more than retail for any sneaker because there will always be a new color or design out next month anyway. There's the disappointment associated with both companies of not getting a sneaker I want, but Nike has taken it to the extreme on the other side so much that most people can't get the shoe and when you actually can its crap quality in comparison to Adidas. Adidas needs to come out with a few more worthwhile pairs, maybe poach some athlete, artists, or designer from Nike, and they can begin to dominate.<p>All of this is with the caveat I have no idea what is going on in the marketplace when it comes to athletic wear for professional athletes. I think personally its less important to nearly everyone who isn't a professional athlete at this point as all the major players seem competent. All the real innovations from Nike, like their swim suits, seem to eventually get banned anyway.
Hm. I had to stop and think at the part: "When the shoes went on sale an hour later, Hebert’s team swarmed the Yeezy Supply website ... each prepped with Hebert’s credit card information and capable of gaming a system meant to limit purchases to one pair per customer.<p>Are the sellers not able to limit based on CC number? Perhaps not. I know most websites don't actually have any visibility into the payment info that is usually handled by a third party payment processor integration.<p>Seriously tho, something must be possible. A payment processor feature that has allotment restrictions based on client+card or delivery address must be possible. Payment processors should be jumping at the opportunity to charge extra for that type of protection for clients that are selling limited high-demand products.<p>Obv using more cards is a workaround, but it doesn't sound like the hoarder even had to go that far.
Serious question: why don't sneaker manufacturers move to an auction model, and simply capture the extra margin for themselves?<p>Some arguments I've heard are "fairness" (as if regular people happily drop $500 on sneakers) and the marketing optics of some sneaker brand being hot because there are queues outside stores before a drop.
I'm going to be very honest here: this whole obsession with artificially limited commodity items like sneakers is utterly insane.<p>Perhaps my outlook is just old-fashioned and practical, but to me, shoes and clothes and similar practical items are meant to be <i>used</i> and <i>worn</i>, not locked away as some sort of store of value, with absolutely no practical purpose, to slowly deteriorate and turn to dust, just because an artificially limited supply was created, and because hype on social media told you to desire them.<p>Use what you buy. If you buy things that you end up not using, give them away to someone who will actually use them. A nicely worn pair of shoes is admirable and completely worn out shoes are a badge of honor. A pair of shoes that just sit unused in the box is a waste.
I wonder if things will get to the point (or maybe we're already there) that it would be feasible enough to set up something akin to a SaaS/PaaS for botting operations. Similar to how DDoS crews rent time and botnet resources for customers, such a service could auction off time slots (e.g. specific 'drop' dates in the case of sneakers) to users who want to buy en masse or ensure that they can at least get some amount of the product they want.
Same thing is happening with other products - for example Magic: The Gathering.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEOB5sltnC8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEOB5sltnC8</a><p>And companies build their products around this:<p><a href="https://secretlair.wizards.com" rel="nofollow">https://secretlair.wizards.com</a>
I read somewhere that athletic shoes don't last. 20-30 years, and they crumble away, even if left untouched in the box.<p>I suppose it's like the foam insulation on my '72 Dodge - touch it and it turns to dust. Some of the plastic parts crack and disintegrate. Rubber falls apart. It was never designed to last this long.
I'm surprised author just have figured that one out, it's been here for like 6 years. As in any system, people will try to game it, and reselling is far from being an incomprehensible one.
How does a 19 year old have an Amex card with over 130k limit?<p>These stories always blow my mind that purport just an ordinary person could do this...
I wonder how he manages to convince/prove to buyers that he's selling authentic product. The problem with buying high-end sneakers on the secondary market is you're very likely to get stuck with a counterfeit. People reselling authentic shoes need to be able to build trust, and it seems like a tough issue.
There’s stories every few days about how some new “asset class” is exploding in value. Sneakers, baseball cards, diamonds, comic books, Bitcoin (I’m sure there are many others). There are signs of a big bubble all over the place now.
It feels overwhelming that there are so many arbitrary, seemingly pedestrian articles of this world being boosted in value to such stratospheric heights. Society's measures just keep seeming so out of balance, so wildly over-inflated, on so many accounts, & it just seems like, with valuations, there's almost never any means for these belief structures to be countered. The structures of faith supporting these valuations have no maintenance costs, & any element of scarcity fuels a FOMO that further stratifies. Everything feels unmoored, decoupled, floating off the planet. I hate that I yearn for reckoning, on so many areas, but economically, faith only ever accrues, builds, escalates.
I cringe every time I see somebody wearing Supreme and talking about how <i>street</i> and <i>cool</i> they are. Supreme is owned by The Carlyle Group :|