GREATEST ‘SHOE’ ON EARTH
‘Shoe Tuber’ stars help kick-start popularity of Sneaker Con event and coveted footwear
We’re very conscious of where the culture is going. This year, we’ve grown a lot more because the culture has grown tremendously, specifically thanks to Adidas.
ALAN VINOGRADOV, Sneaker Con co-founder
The average investor or consumer may not have realized that Adidas AG was overtaking Nike Inc.’s Jordan Brand until market share data from researcher The NPD Group made the German company’s ascendancy official a few weeks ago. But the team at Sneaker Con saw it coming more than two years ago.
Alan Vinogradov, one of the sneaker convention’s three cofounders, remembers a relatively unsuccessful event held in Chicago in June 2015.
“The energy was not there, and people didn’t seem passionate about the product,” he said.
The sneaker industry — long dominated by various Nike models and Air Jordans and celebrity athlete endorsements — was in the early stages of what became a massive shift toward lifestyle-oriented footwear, and one that Adidas was quick to capitalize on.
Nowhere was this shift more evident than on social media platforms such as Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram and, of course, YouTube, where a new breed of celebrity — often dubbed “Shoe Tubers” — is helping to determine which brands become popular as well as breathe new life into sneaker conventions.
Sneaker video content creators on YouTube have been around almost as long as the platform itself, but those who attract the most attention these days often focus on what’s hot, new and expensive. These sneaker reviewers and video bloggers (vloggers) may not be able to count traditional footwear connoisseurs as their biggest fans, but they certainly aren’t struggling in terms of popularity.
Crowds of hundreds and sometimes thousands of kids and adults gather outside Sneaker Con events — the self-proclaimed “Greatest Sneaker Show on Earth” — well before they open. Buying hard-tofind sneakers is one interest, but many just want to meet the Shoe Tubers.
Some of the more colourful characters include Winnipeg-based Branden Wiebe (NameBran), who’s known for wild experiments such as baking expensive Air Jordans and Yeezys (rapper Kanye West’s brand); Jaycee Lopez (Two Js Kicks), who uses the platform to promote his popular Las Vegas sneaker store Urban Necessities; and Teddy Safarian (OhItsTeddy), a 35-year-old tattoo artist who dedicates a good portion of his vlogs to smoking marijuana and playing with his English Bulldog puppy. Safarian is known in the sneaker community as the Boost God for his unwavering commitment to Adidas and its comfortoriented technology.
At Sneaker Con these days you’re much more likely to see clothing designed by Qias Omar, whose QrewTV channel has more than 850,000 subscribers, or another Shoe Tuber’s merchandise, than Michael Jordan jerseys or T-shirts.
“We want them to be part of our event, bring people together, and produce items for the consumer that is passionate about what they’re doing and Sneaker Con,” Vinogradov said. “We’ve injected these guys because it’s like the democratization of sneaker culture.”
As the biggest sneaker convention player, Sneaker Con is an ideal place to gauge the footwear market. It welcomed more than 70,000 attendees at 13 events in 2016, and that number is expected to be much higher this year as organizers bumped the number of events up to 18.
Canada is no stranger to sneaker conventions. Events such as Sole Exchange Canada’s Ultimate Sneaker Show have been around for years. This year’s shows crossed the country from Halifax to Vancouver, with several stops in between.
But Sneaker Con is the biggest name in the game, and it’s hosting six events outside the U.S. this year. Following successful forays overseas in London, Hong Kong and Melbourne, Sneaker Con makes its first visit to Canada on Oct. 14 in Toronto.
The rapidly growing group of Shoe Tubers may not be raking in anywhere near what YouTube sensation Casey Neistat does — nearly eight million subscribers and climbing. But he is the inspiration for the growing popularity of vlogs.
Many sneaker-related content producers have even made YouTube their full-time job, with sponsorships and free trips helping to supplement the advertising income generated by their videos. They’re also frequently the first to get sneakers from the major footwear brands to review.
It’s a win-win for the Shoe Tubers and Sneaker Con. The video makers who show up get more exposure for their channels and have a venue to sell their merchandise, while the events have never been so popular.
“We’re very conscious of where the culture is going,” Vinogradov said. “This year, we’ve grown a lot more because the culture has grown tremendously, specifically thanks to Adidas.”
Adidas moved quickly on the shift toward lifestyle-oriented footwear, and away from bulky retro and performance basketball sneakers. As a result, its share price has soared 230 per cent since the beginning of 2015, and it’s been able to drive changes in the shoe market as well as general fashion trends.
“That’s when we saw the ‘Kanye effect’ really start to impact sneaker culture as we knew it,” Vinogradov said.
Kanye West left Nike for Adidas in 2013 and the first of many Yeezy Boosts (Yeezy is Kanye’s nickname) was released in February 2015.
The Yeezy footwear line quickly became the most-coveted sneakers around — often fetching upwards of US$2,000 on the resale market versus a retail price in the US$220-to-US$350 range — and the rapper’s influence has also helped Adidas push other models and clothing styles into the minds of consumers.
Most people aren’t willing to wait in line for hours, or pay a huge mark-up, so they likely won’t get their hands on a pair of Yeezys. But the shoe has influenced the mainstream footwear market, too.
For example, the sub-$100 Tubular Shadow has become Adidas’s best-selling sneaker by dollars spent. The similarities between Yeezys and this model — along with many of the company’s new designs and those of several other brands — are obvious.
Meanwhile, the Adidas Ultra Boost, a running shoe turned lifestyle sneaker that earned the company a lot of praise for innovation, and is now widely considered its most popular product, didn’t get much attention until West was spotted wearing them.
“Kanye West is the modern day Michael Jordan in many ways,” Vinogradov said. “I give no credit specifically to Adidas. I give complete credit to Kanye West as being the individual that drove the direction of this culture. Adidas has benefited greatly because of that.”
Adidas’s market share in the U.S. jumped to 11.3 per cent in the first eight months of 2017, up from 6.6 per cent during the same period last year, while Nike dipped to 37 per cent from 39 per cent, and, despite a production surge, Jordan Brand only grew to 9.5 per cent from 9.4 per cent. U.S. sales for Adidas rose 31 per cent in the first quarter, and that has investors growing more concerned about Nike’s future prospects.
Consumer behaviour is in sync with these numbers. Whereas sneaker lovers once lined up around the block — sometimes days in advance of the actual release date — for Air Jordans, now they do it more often for limited production Ultra Boosts and Yeezys.
Riding this wave of popularity, Adidas is putting Boost — the innovative foam cushioning material it licensed from German chemicals giant BASF SE — into more new models. It’s also updating classics such as the Superstar and Stan Smith with the new technology, which is making an already oversaturated retail and resale sneaker market even more so.
NPD Group analyst Matt Powell noted that Jordan Brand increased supply in an effort to break the grip that the resale market holds on desirable sneakers. The strategy was also intended to combat the sales slowdown that Nike’s business as a whole has been suffering.
A return to perceived scarcity and the cache that comes with limited products may be the answer for Nike, but Adidas is riding the wave of popularity and adopting a high-production approach, too.
“Shoes that used to sell within hours are now taking weeks to sell out,” Powell said. “When that occurs, it really crushes the resale market.”
These trends are having a big impact on a U.S. athletic footwear market, which is worth about US$37 billion annually, but also the estimated US$1 billion secondary sneaker resale market. For the most part, the secondary market is based on scarcity: the rarer a sneaker is, the higher resale value it typically commands.
But you don’t need to ask an analyst or track prices on StockX to know that reselling sneakers isn’t as lucrative as it was just a few years ago.
Any sneaker convention vendor or store owner will confirm that prices for the average pair of shoes have come down, as even persistent demand can’t keep up with massive supply. That’s a big reason why a much larger assortment of popular clothing brands are now being sold at these events and in retail locations.
“(The resale market) is a bubble, and I think that bubble is probably starting to burst,” Powell said. “It is essentially an artificial marketplace that is not as lucrative as it once was. The more casual flipper has sort of lost interest at this point.”