HIGH-END SNEAKER STORE ON STRIP HAS LOCAL FLAVOR
This story was posted on lasvegassun.com at 2 a.m. today.
The Miracle Mile Shops at Planet Hollywood are known to draw a lot of tourists from the Strip.
But there’s one store inside the mall — other than the “Welcome to Las Vegas” stores, of course — that has a distinctively local feel.
It’s called Correct Merch, a high-end sneaker and specialty clothing shop that opened in June.
The store is owned by former Bishop Gorman and Green Valley High School basketball player Dom Pontoni.
Rashad Muhammad, also a former Bishop Gorman standout and the brother of former NBA player Shabazz Muhammad, is Correct Merch’s vice president.
The friends, who met while attending the Catholic high school in Las Vegas about a decade ago, say the brick-andmortar business has done well during its first two months in existence.
The storefront is an attempt to branch out from what has been a successful online concept. In a business that is nearly perfect for the social media world, Correct Merch has more than 30,000 followers on Instagram, allowing it to essentially act as its own advertising agency.
“Even when we were at Gorman, we always liked clothes and shoes,” Pontoni said. “We’ve been selling online since 2017 and we had success with that, but, during COVID, the business really took off. I’m not sure if it was the stimulus checks or what, but people were buying, and we saw an opportunity there.”
The shop, the former home of The Walking Company shoe store, is small, but it’s a paradise for any sneaker head.
On display are rows of some of the most coveted sneakers and basketball shoes on the planet, a list that includes numerous editions of the popular Air Jordan and Adidas Yeezy brands, some with a price tag upwards of $1,000 for a pair.
The display shoes are wrapped in plastic, not because of worry about the spread
of the delta variant, but because nobody wants shoes like that to collect dust or have anything spilled on them.
Correct also sells apparel, including high-end streetwear T-shirts, sweatshirts and jackets. The most expensive clothing item in the shop is a Vlone jacket with a price tag of $1,500.
“The product sells itself,” Pontoni said. “The hardest part is getting inventory. It’s all about networking. We know guys who we don’t even know how they get stuff, but they get it. In our network, I’d say there’s three or four top people. There are others who we get maybe five pairs of shoes from.”
Always a shoe fan and clotheshorse, Pontoni decided to dive headfirst into the shoe-dealing business after leaving Benedictine University in Mesa, Ariz., in 2017.
The 6-foot-4 Pontoni had hoped to continue his basketball career as a shooting guard at the university, but it didn’t work out, he said.
Instead, he started to travel to Los Angeles every week to stand in line at sneaker stores for new-product releases. While there, Pontoni said he would sleep in his car Tuesday through Thursdays.
That’s after he worked weekends at a call center.
“I met a lot of connections in LA,” Pontoni said. “I was there every week for a while, and LA is kind of the mecca for what I was doing. I would wait in first-come, first-serve lines at Supreme LA, and I was making good money (reselling what he purchased).”
Pontoni said he quit the call center job in 2018. With a network of suppliers, and the connections that came from knowing Rashad and Shabazz Muhammad, Pontoni made the decision to go all in on his passion.
“Once we opened the location, a lot of people started talking and that helped us,” Pontoni said. “There was a huge turnout when we opened. It was difficult to get into Miracle Mile. Our store is the smallest space in the whole mall. The Miracle Mile people saw the internet following we have and they gave us a shot.”
The concept is simple — the Correct Merch guys do the work to get sought-after items like Nike Dunks, the latest Jordans, or Air Force 1s so the customer doesn’t have to spend hours on the internet or waiting in line at another store.
There’s a markup for that convenience, of course, but Correct Merch will generally carry shoes that won’t be found at Foot Locker or Champs.
To get the merchandise they want, customers will pay extra, Pontoni said.
Along with Muhammad, Pontoni also has former Bishop Gorman basketball players Richie Thornton V and Ugo Amadi, who walked on at UNR, working at Correct Merch as managers.
“We have a lot of faith in Dom,” Thornton said. “At the store, we know how to communicate with people and help them have a good time. It’s all love here, it’s all family.”
Pontoni said he put “everything” he had into the opening of the store, though he was aided by a small group of investors.
He’s also on the lookout for more capital to help grow the concept. The plan, Pontoni said, is to open additional stores.
The fact that NBA players like Lonzo Ball and Patrick Williams of the Chicago Bulls, Obi Toppin of the New York Knicks and Tyrese Haliburton of the Sacramento Kings have all visited the store recently while the NBA Summer League was taking place in town helped the marketing effort.
Ball and his brother, Liangelo, have been Correct Merch customers since before the storefront opened. Lonzo Ball alone has more than 10.7 million followers on Instagram.
To put that number of followers in perspective, that’s more than one-third of the number of Instagram followers that boxing great Floyd Mayweather has.
“What we’re doing, this is popular in our age group,” Pontoni said. “We know there’s a lot of potential. This is what I want to do until I can’t do it anymore. We’re young to be doing something like this, which surprises some people, but we’re just some good friends who are local to Las Vegas doing something in a booming industry.”
Anointed by his friends as the most fashionable of the bunch — also known as the “drip lord” of the crew — Muhammad might have put it best.
“To do it with the homies, it’s dope,” Muhammad said. “We work so well together. I think playing sports helped us in that area. We’re learning every week, every day, but people want what they can’t get and we have it. The sky is the limit.”