Back in February, a few sneaker experts told us that Jordan releases were getting over-saturated, with way too many shoes hitting stores. Last month, Josh Luber, one of the sneakerhead data wizards over at StockX (formerly known as Campless), published an in-depth report arguing that Jordan’s dominance on the resell market may be slipping, as the brand is making it harder for collectors and resellers to make a profit.
For Jordan releases to stay hyped, the brand needs a thriving resell market. It needs resellers lining up on drop day because they know they can flip Jordans for a profit. Josh argues that Jordan is squeezing out professional resellers, as it is producing way too many shoes for some releases and way too little for others. If resellers can no longer make cash from Jordan drops, then that gives other brands — say, adidas — a golden opportunity to generate huge amounts of hype through limited releases (like the NMD, for example).
StockX provides the data for Highsnobiety‘s quarterly sneaker reports, and are absolute experts when it comes to the secondary market for sneakers.
Below we’ve provided a condensed version of Josh’s report, in his own words. Sneakerheads with a hardcore data fetish should head over to StockX to see the piece in full (warning: there’s lots of statistics).
At one point, Nike, including Jordan Brand, accounted for 96% of the resell market.* That number has dropped consistently and considerably since February 2015 — when adidas launched the YEEZY. Since then, adidas has taken share of the resell market with every release. Kanye is this generation’s Jordan. There. I said it.
But this isn’t an analysis of adidas. That will come later. Because despite the rapid resell growth of the Brand with the Three Stripes, adidas is still a distant second to Nike. The majority of the resell dollars spent on any given day are still the latest Retro Jordan drop. But if the trends we’ve seen over the last 16 months continue, that may not be the case for long.
Jordan Brand has had a rough time on the resell circuit lately. In 2015, for the first time in a very, very long time, we saw some Retro Jordans sit, with a few even landing on clearance. So far during 2016 they’ve appeared to pull back from the edge – a few big shoes will make it feel like that – but on the whole the Jordan resell game has continued the decline started in 2015, and may be headed for more clearance racks than we’ve seen since the mid 2000s.
*All data in this article is through April 2016.
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. No it's because these reseller dorks aren't making the money that they were making before off of them.
