Cyprus Mail 14 March 2021 - by Andrew Rosenbaum
The search for yield is turning many unlikely collectibles into gold. The latest of these is sneakers.
The trick is to buy really cool sneakers at the retail price, hold them (don’t wear them) for a while, and then resell them at a collector’s price.
At Stadium Goods, the New York-based sneaker-resale company, people frequently buy and sell footwear for thousands of dollars. The company is skilled at authenticating them, and then putting them up for auction.
There is, in fact, a market for secondary sales of sneakers valued at about $300 million, and many collectors believe it will reach $1 billion in a year or two.
At StockX, another online sneaker marketplace, the most profitable sneakers sold there were the Jordan 5 Retro Trophy Room University Red (F&F), went for an average of more than $5,200—a premium of about 2,490 per cent. The Jordan 1 Retro High Dior has an average resale price in excess of $11,300. Collectors were bidding on that pair of sneakers even before it was released, according to the website.
“The investment element has always been there as a consequence of the culture, Derek Morrison, StockX’s London-based director for Europe, told the Tatler. “You would typically try to buy two pairs of the same shoe; the other pair would go up in value and pay for the first. It was passion-led and helped you scale your collection or validate what you were doing. But over the last decade people have realised the economic aspect, beyond passion.”
“Some of the shoes that have proved most valuable have artists’ names attached to them, such as the NikeCraft Mars Yard 1.0, created with Tom Sachs. Debuting in 2012 at $385, it now sells for between 10 and 20 times that amount. The 2.0 iteration, launched at $200 in 2017, has seen a similar increase in value. Another example is the Future Runner 4D collaboration between Adidas and Daniel Arsham: released at $450 in 2018, its price has gone up fourfold,” the Tatler reports.
Clearly, the sneaker investment game is not one to play if you aren’t willing to become a kind of expert in the trade. But it is the kind of thing that, if you make the effort and get in early, you could make sizeable profit on the shoes your size.
