* Counterfeit expertise. Counterfeits are common with high-end sneakers.
* Presentation focused on shoes and not goods. Why is this shoe important amongst the many shoes available?
* Superior search and discovery.
They certainly don't have the TAM of eBay, but specialists can have huge advantages when they build an entire site, and set of processes, around one market segment. If I can pay for the transaction with a frictionless payment system (e.g., Amazon Pay or Apple Pay), I'm way more likely to use the specialty retailer.
Tracking sneaker values has long been Mr. Luber’s obsession. In the late 2000s, he was a strategy analyst at IBM in New York who spent his nights trawling eBay for data on how much sought-after shoes were selling for on the secondary market. He compiled those figures into Campless, a sort of Kelly Blue Book for sneaker-resale value. But Mr. Luber wasn’t satisfied with eBay. His beefs weren’t limited to the bad photos that sellers posted or their habit of selling fakes. What really bugged him was the absence of price standardization. One dealer might peddle a pair of Nike Dunks for $100 and another might list the same shoes for $300. Mr. Luber envisioned a more orderly market, with a New York Stock Exchange-style ticker, that would make the value of a pair of sneakers transparent, in real time. When those Dunks sold for $100, everyone on the market would know about it, thus forcing other sellers to knock their prices down to the going rate.
Around that same time, Dan Gilbert, the founder of mortgage lending company Quicken Loans, noticed that his teenage son was flipping sneakers on eBay for profit. Intrigued, Mr. Gilbert founded a research team on sneaker reselling who discovered what Mr. Luber was working on. Mr. Gilbert bought Campless in 2015 and the pair joined forces (along with COO Greg Schwartz), launching StockX, “the stock market of things,” based in Mr. Gilbert’s hometown of Detroit in February 2016.
Further mitigating risk for the buyer, StockX acts as a middleman for payment and does not release proceeds of the sale to the seller until the shoes have been verified. Carlos Chavez, 34, an engineer and part-time sneaker seller in Los Angeles, prefers using StockX (or GOAT, a newer rival app) to eBay, after he experienced a “chargeback,” in which PayPalfroze his proceeds of a sale for two weeks because the buyer used a counterfeit payment.
“I’ve sold on both eBay and Grailed but the big reason I prefer StockX for shoes is to not be scammed,” said Mr. Chavez, who in September used his funds from flipping sneakers to finance a vacation to Oaxaca with his wife. In a statement, an eBay spokesperson noted that it offers a money-back guarantee if a buyer identifies a counterfeit and that since 1998 it has had the Verified Rights Owner Program (VeRO), which allows brands themselves to more easily report fake items on eBay. Further, in October 2017 eBay launched “eBay Authenticate” which inspects and validates luxury items such as Prada handbags and Rolex watches.
I would pay $5-10 a month for a service that summarized articles in brief bulleted lists, and placed 'highlights' - like your block of excerpts - at the bottom.
The headline says "stock market" for Nikes. I interpreted it as sort of like a game where you could flip Nikes or bet on the price of them or something.
If it's a secondary market like Ebay, say so. That's much more straightforward.
The "stock market" as most people imagine it has two major features IMO:
1) The "distributed ownership" bit – purchase shares representing fractional ownership of something.
2) The "collaborative price finding" bit – use liquidity and misc market forces to find the market price of most things in a fast, continuous, and least painful way.
You're talking about 1, which yes, totally irrelevant. They're talking about 2, which is very relevant.
I'll concede that if you want to be pedantic about semantics, "market" is better than "stock market", but would counter that people think of a "market" as a place where you go to buy lettuce, rather than a conceptual price-finding environment. The stock market concept better matches this abstraction in laypeople's minds.
>The stock market concept better matches this abstraction in laypeople's minds.
In even more obvious cosmetic comparisons, the word "Stock" is in embedded in the company name "StockX", and when you go to the "stockx.com" url, there's a ticker of live shoe prices scrolling sideways similar to the traditional stock market displays. The landing webpage also bills itself as, "The Stock Market of Things".
The "stock market" analogy (however flawed it is) is clearly intended to connect to laypeople and not meant to pass a vocabulary test by college econ professors.
Not for watches, but there is a platform for collector cars, Rally Rd [0]. Each car gets its own defined company, you buy/sell company shares through Rally Rd. It's not fully liquid, as there's only one trading window per car per month.
It's tough to avoid complaints when you're a bigger company, but when I hear StockX, I'm forced to think about the multiple complaints of fake selling through them.
One part of the company is verification that the shoes are real. So while they missed in that case I'm sure they are trying to improve. On something like ebay you have zero verification. And you can always get a refund.
One of the cases listed above is how they didn't give a refund after going up in the supervisor chain, where the higher person still said the shoes were legit. Only when the story was high up on reddit did they give in. Definitely trying to improve for sure however.
> The only decent song they
> played was ruff ryders anthem.
> My coworkers were arrogant and
> unfriendly. Imagine a bunch of
> clowns that only rock off whites
> or yeezy’s.
Goodness gracious! The horrors!
Then again...
> They quickly examine the shoe,
> check the bottoms and inside to
> make sure its not worn, sniff it,
> and put the green tag on it.
At first glance this is backwards because "buy low sell high". Then I realized those prices includes all sizes. So if you look at each size it makes sense:
Size 12: $233 ask, $215 bid
Size 16: $572 ask, $425 bid
The ticket/graphs show sales at all sizes, which is useless as an indicator of trends at the sizes you want/have.
From what I can see there is no way as an end user to verify the quality of the goods being shipped.
The whole point of an exchange is the things being traded are fungible.
I see lots of rolxes being traded, but are they real? have they been used? are they grey imports? I don't see how you're supposed to trust anything thats on there.
The real value add that Stockx provides is verification of authenticity where they employ specialists to do the verification work. Their competitor GOAT also does the same thing but focuses on sneakers.
The whole value add of this company vs Ebay is that they are supposed to have "experts" verifying the authenticity of the shoes. I recently read an account where they pretty much hired someone off the street and had him verifying a shoe per minute on his first day. I ordered a pair of Yeezys from them 2 weeks ago and was some what concerned with the fact they verified and shipped my pair out the same day they received it from the seller...
> Mr. Luber, co-founder of StockX, an online trading platform for sneakers, streetwear, handbags and watches, hates when companies disrupt his market strategy. “The one thing that breaks the supply-and-demand model and the purity of it in the secondary market is when brands artificially f--- with it when they restock stuff,” said Mr. Luber
What purity? You're running a resale market for shoes that are scarce in the same way rare Magic cards are scarce: entirely at the whim of the company. That's what supply-and-demand is like when there's a monopoly on supply!
Regardless of whether you want to call it a reissue or a reprint, doing so for, e.g., the Power 9, would decimate the secondary market value of those cards, as a lot of that value comes from people who buy them to play the Legacy or Vintage formats. Obviously collectors would still place a premium on the originals (assuming you could actually tell them apart), but it would still have a devastating effect on the "investors".
There's plenty of people that make full-time livings on buying, selling, and trading collectibles, Magic cards included. You just have to accept that if you live by the sword, you can die by the sword too.
The trichotomy I use is investment, speculation, and depreciating asset. Examples of the first would be stocks in a publicly traded company or an investment property with positive cashflow. Examples of the second would be cryptocurrencies, trading cards, or rare automobiles. Examples of the third would be consumer goods or commonplace automobiles.
It really grinds my gears when someone says something like "You need to invest in a good gaming PC." No, that's not an investment. It's not even speculation. It falls squarely into the depreciating asset (i.e. worst) category. You're guaranteed to lose more and more money on that over time, until it loses all value.
I had the unique and very dystopian experience of StockX irrevocably banning me (as a purchaser) from their platform because I hit some fraud flags. No requests for verification or alternate payment method, just an outright "no, we won't sell to you, period". I emailed their CEO, no reply.
No troubles with goat.com, so they get my business instead.
There's already a large and trusted market for reselling verified used Rolexes: HQ Milton, Bob's Watches, Crown and Caliber, the list goes on and on. This doesn't seem very new, at least for the watches.
I'm a decent sized reseller and stockx is amazing.
First off all my sneakers are legit and purchased straight from the company (adidas from adidas.com, nikes from nike.com, etc). I tried setting up a website to sell my sneakers and I didn't fare well as nobody really trusts some random site.
Stockx legitimized my selling, taking care of that entire issue. I get less money than I would through direct sales but I have zero legwork. I automated the process so as soon as I receive product, it's posted on stockx for sale. When sold, I simply print the shipping label and take it to the UPS store.
I know that there will always be issues with legitimacy but if they continue making it easier for legit sellers to move product, we'll crowd out the scammers who don't have nearly as much volume. Authenticating a pair of shoes shouldn't take that long. When releases happen, stockx gets a large number of the same exact shoe. They can compare one sellers to anothers and see if there are differences. If I send in 10 pairs of Yeezys that are legit, they'll be able to spot the 1 pair someone sent in that isn't the same.
Also in regards to Mr. Lubers statement about restocking. It's less common than you think and very rare sneakers are often never restocked at the level necessary to destroy demand. In fact, in some instances a company will put out a rare sneaker years later (Jordan Brand calls these "retros") and unfortunately the quality has slipped over the years. So retros that are worse quality remakes of older models can raise the valaue of originals. I usually sell unsold pairs before restocks happen as it brings the value of them back to really profitable levels.
StockX is an interesting company. I am a former employee there from the engineering side of things. While a lot of great people work there and they are a “hot” startup in Detroit, I would never recommend anyone take a position there. Their leadership is unfortunately not a very trustworthy set of individuals and their culture is very toxic. They attract a lot talent because they can pay for it.
In the early days their authenticators took great care to verify every item that came in and they were proud of the service they provided. It sounds like they have had a tough time scaling this part of the business.
48 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 90.3 ms ] threadSorry if this was addressed in the article, but there was a paywall to read.
Tracking sneaker values has long been Mr. Luber’s obsession. In the late 2000s, he was a strategy analyst at IBM in New York who spent his nights trawling eBay for data on how much sought-after shoes were selling for on the secondary market. He compiled those figures into Campless, a sort of Kelly Blue Book for sneaker-resale value. But Mr. Luber wasn’t satisfied with eBay. His beefs weren’t limited to the bad photos that sellers posted or their habit of selling fakes. What really bugged him was the absence of price standardization. One dealer might peddle a pair of Nike Dunks for $100 and another might list the same shoes for $300. Mr. Luber envisioned a more orderly market, with a New York Stock Exchange-style ticker, that would make the value of a pair of sneakers transparent, in real time. When those Dunks sold for $100, everyone on the market would know about it, thus forcing other sellers to knock their prices down to the going rate.
Around that same time, Dan Gilbert, the founder of mortgage lending company Quicken Loans, noticed that his teenage son was flipping sneakers on eBay for profit. Intrigued, Mr. Gilbert founded a research team on sneaker reselling who discovered what Mr. Luber was working on. Mr. Gilbert bought Campless in 2015 and the pair joined forces (along with COO Greg Schwartz), launching StockX, “the stock market of things,” based in Mr. Gilbert’s hometown of Detroit in February 2016.
Further mitigating risk for the buyer, StockX acts as a middleman for payment and does not release proceeds of the sale to the seller until the shoes have been verified. Carlos Chavez, 34, an engineer and part-time sneaker seller in Los Angeles, prefers using StockX (or GOAT, a newer rival app) to eBay, after he experienced a “chargeback,” in which PayPalfroze his proceeds of a sale for two weeks because the buyer used a counterfeit payment.
“I’ve sold on both eBay and Grailed but the big reason I prefer StockX for shoes is to not be scammed,” said Mr. Chavez, who in September used his funds from flipping sneakers to finance a vacation to Oaxaca with his wife. In a statement, an eBay spokesperson noted that it offers a money-back guarantee if a buyer identifies a counterfeit and that since 1998 it has had the Verified Rights Owner Program (VeRO), which allows brands themselves to more easily report fake items on eBay. Further, in October 2017 eBay launched “eBay Authenticate” which inspects and validates luxury items such as Prada handbags and Rolex watches.
Authentication and price sales transparency.
Its more like the journalist and developer knows how to make a product relatable. Take notes.
If it's a secondary market like Ebay, say so. That's much more straightforward.
Getting to this point would have required reading past the headline.
1) The "distributed ownership" bit – purchase shares representing fractional ownership of something.
2) The "collaborative price finding" bit – use liquidity and misc market forces to find the market price of most things in a fast, continuous, and least painful way.
You're talking about 1, which yes, totally irrelevant. They're talking about 2, which is very relevant.
I'll concede that if you want to be pedantic about semantics, "market" is better than "stock market", but would counter that people think of a "market" as a place where you go to buy lettuce, rather than a conceptual price-finding environment. The stock market concept better matches this abstraction in laypeople's minds.
In even more obvious cosmetic comparisons, the word "Stock" is in embedded in the company name "StockX", and when you go to the "stockx.com" url, there's a ticker of live shoe prices scrolling sideways similar to the traditional stock market displays. The landing webpage also bills itself as, "The Stock Market of Things".
The "stock market" analogy (however flawed it is) is clearly intended to connect to laypeople and not meant to pass a vocabulary test by college econ professors.
[0] https://www.rallyrd.com/
https://old.reddit.com/r/Sneakers/comments/9tqfv6/i_received...
https://old.reddit.com/r/Sneakers/comments/9uqafs/stockx_sen...
https://old.reddit.com/r/Sneakers/comments/9jaj4r/exposing_s...
Can't be a good thing for people to think that about a company.
https://niketalk.com/threads/what%E2%80%99s-it-like-to-work-...
Then again...
... I think I can understand the moodiness now.Lowest ask: $230, Highest bid: $425
At first glance this is backwards because "buy low sell high". Then I realized those prices includes all sizes. So if you look at each size it makes sense:
Size 12: $233 ask, $215 bid
Size 16: $572 ask, $425 bid
The ticket/graphs show sales at all sizes, which is useless as an indicator of trends at the sizes you want/have.
The whole point of an exchange is the things being traded are fungible.
I see lots of rolxes being traded, but are they real? have they been used? are they grey imports? I don't see how you're supposed to trust anything thats on there.
What purity? You're running a resale market for shoes that are scarce in the same way rare Magic cards are scarce: entirely at the whim of the company. That's what supply-and-demand is like when there's a monopoly on supply!
The trichotomy I use is investment, speculation, and depreciating asset. Examples of the first would be stocks in a publicly traded company or an investment property with positive cashflow. Examples of the second would be cryptocurrencies, trading cards, or rare automobiles. Examples of the third would be consumer goods or commonplace automobiles.
It really grinds my gears when someone says something like "You need to invest in a good gaming PC." No, that's not an investment. It's not even speculation. It falls squarely into the depreciating asset (i.e. worst) category. You're guaranteed to lose more and more money on that over time, until it loses all value.
No troubles with goat.com, so they get my business instead.
First off all my sneakers are legit and purchased straight from the company (adidas from adidas.com, nikes from nike.com, etc). I tried setting up a website to sell my sneakers and I didn't fare well as nobody really trusts some random site.
Stockx legitimized my selling, taking care of that entire issue. I get less money than I would through direct sales but I have zero legwork. I automated the process so as soon as I receive product, it's posted on stockx for sale. When sold, I simply print the shipping label and take it to the UPS store.
I know that there will always be issues with legitimacy but if they continue making it easier for legit sellers to move product, we'll crowd out the scammers who don't have nearly as much volume. Authenticating a pair of shoes shouldn't take that long. When releases happen, stockx gets a large number of the same exact shoe. They can compare one sellers to anothers and see if there are differences. If I send in 10 pairs of Yeezys that are legit, they'll be able to spot the 1 pair someone sent in that isn't the same.
Also in regards to Mr. Lubers statement about restocking. It's less common than you think and very rare sneakers are often never restocked at the level necessary to destroy demand. In fact, in some instances a company will put out a rare sneaker years later (Jordan Brand calls these "retros") and unfortunately the quality has slipped over the years. So retros that are worse quality remakes of older models can raise the valaue of originals. I usually sell unsold pairs before restocks happen as it brings the value of them back to really profitable levels.
In the early days their authenticators took great care to verify every item that came in and they were proud of the service they provided. It sounds like they have had a tough time scaling this part of the business.