WALKING TALL
The trainers tycoon who started his business in a terraced house
A YOUNG man’s passion for designer trainers became the spark for multimillion pound fashion business.
Mo Patel was living in a two-up, twodown terrace when he first had the idea to sell rare and coveted trainer styles after struggling to find the ones he wanted himself.
He started out by simply selling Nike Huaraches in 2014 on auction website eBay. Now he oversees a team of 14 selling thousands of wanted, rare and designer trainers by the likes of Yeezy, Dior, Nike and Louis Vuitton across the world with clients including footballers and superstars.
The online business – Crepslocker – became such a success that Mo has just realised another of his dreams - by opening his own store in the centre of Manchester, on King Street.
Inside the store there is a quite dazzling array of rare and unusual trainers and designer accessories – including an entire hero wall dedicated to rare and coveted Nikes, Yeezy Belugas for £325, designer Dior Jordans priced at £10,495 and coveted Louis Vuitton trainers for around £1,000 - £2,500.
Looking around the stylish store, Mo, 36, beams: “I’ve started from nowhere and now I’m looking at other stores across the UK. Nobody believed that this could work, yet now here I am with my own store in the centre of Manchester, it was always my dream and now it is reality.”
It all started with Mo’s passion for unusual trainers. Back in 2014 Mo was working for his dad Naz Patel and his uncles’ furniture business at Gordon Mill in Blackburn, while living in his modest £72,000 terraced house. It was then the idea for Crepslocker was born.
Mo explains: “I had a passion for designer clothing and trainers, and Instagram was very new back then. The majority of brands, when they released anything new, would put it on Insta for people to see, so I made an Instagram account, I called it Crepslocker and everything started from there really.”
Mo sold his first trainers on auction website eBay after seeing how in demand some styles were becoming. He says: “There was a trainer, the Huarache Nike, that cost £100 in the shops, but I could see people were reselling them online for £200. So I went down to my local JD Sports, purchased five pairs and basically started selling them on eBay.” But Mo soon realised the snag in this plan. “I had to pay eBay 10 per cent for every sale, so I thought ‘hang on, I could do this myself.’ So I started selling from Instagram.”
At the start he would pack all the trainers to send out to customers on his living room floor - but as business expanded he would borrow his auntie’s house and father’s garden as a better backdrop for the photos on his Instagram.
Within a year, Mo was making enough money from buying and reselling coveted trainers to see that he could make a business out of it. He says: “My dad could see I was doing this on the side and it was my passion. I did it for a year, and in 2015 I started doing it full time. He let me use an office in the mill and by that point I was making £3,500£4,500 a month in sales.”
By 2017, he had launched his own Crepslocker website, but was still packing stock on his living room floor. But by 2018 Mo says Crepslocker had turned over its first million – and has witnessed further growth in turnover every year since then.
Mo now has a team of 14 employees and his success has allowed to swap his two-up, two-down for a detached mansion – a house he had always driven past and dreamed one day would be his. He now lives there with his wife and their sons Adam eight, and Haris, four. He has a walk-in wardrobe with some 600 pairs of trainers that he has collected over the years.
As to his advice to other would-be entrepreneurs out there, Mo has a positive message to share. He says “Pursue your dreams, stick at it, you’ve got to chase your dreams and believe in yourself. Nothing comes easy in life, you must work hard for it but if you want it badly enough, you will get there!”