‘SATIN’ KICKS BUTT
Kanye, Jordan and the $1B fashion sneaker game
On the morning of Oct. 18, some of New York City’s savviest investors, a mostly young group of males, lined up outside a store in Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood waiting for the hottest product in recent months to make its debut. An IPO? You can call it that. But this offering had little to do with the New York Stock Exchange, located about two miles south, and there was, very likely, nary a fine-tailored suit, Goldman Sachs partner or SEC regulator on Wooster Street that morning.
Hitting the public markets that day was the Satin Air Jordan 1 Banned, perhaps the most coveted sneaker ever.
The $175 Nike product — so named because Michael Jordan wore them his rookie season, and the NBA banned them and fined his Airness $5,000 a game because the black-and-red kicks didn’t match the colors in the uniform — carries an asking price today on eBay of about $2,000.
Take that Twilio! The hot tech initial public offering is up just 174 percent from its June debut price of $15 a share. The Satin Air Jordans are up more than 11-fold — in less than a week.
Welcome to the world of the $1 billion fashion sneaker resale market, which is hotter than pre-IPO Facebook shares and more in style than Anna Wintour during Fashion Week.
While sneaker resales represent just 5 percent of all sneaker sales, according to NPD Group sports analyst Matt Powell, the business is exploding. High profit is one of the main thrusters, he said.
New wide-release sneaker lines — like the new LeBron James model from Nike and Stephen Curry models from Under Armour — are timed to the start of the NBA sea- son. And with the tip-off of the 2016-17 schedule set for Oct. 25, this week promises to be one of the hottest sevenday stretches of the year.
Add to the usual mix the recent offerings from Kanye West, like his Adidas Yeezy Boost 350 Moonrock, originally sold for $200, and you have a very heated market.
The lowest asking price for the Boost 350 Moonrock on Amazon on Sunday was $2,000.
One person who saw the bright future of fashion sneakers is Yu-Ming Wu, the owner of Stadium Goods, a premium sneaker store with two locations downtown.
Wu started SneakerCon, a convention site for fashion and limited-edition sneakers, seven years ago in a New York church basement.
Today, SneakerCon has expanded to Washington, DC, and Atlanta — and the Big Apple show, beginning Nov. 5 this year will for the first time be spread over two days.
It will draw about 20,000 sneaker fans. Last year, ATMs near the Javits Center, where SneakerCon is held, were drained of all their cash by must-have-them-now sneaker addicts.
Brooklyn resident Jeffrey Panlilio, an A&E executive and a father of three, is hoping to score a pair of the Satin Air Jordans at SneakerCon. He plans to sell the Boost 350 Moonrock sneakers that he bought last year for less than $300 for about $1,200 to finance that buy.
“I like to wear stuff that not to many people have,” Panlilio said of his 250-pair collection.