My girlfriend likes to equate sneaker collecting culture to Sex and the City fashionista Carrie Bradshaw’s predilection for Manolo Blahniks. But she fails to realize that sneaker collecting is less pretentious than the Sex and the City phenomenon—albeit not much—and Bradshaw is probably not turning around and flipping her Manolos on eBay for two and three times the retail price.
According to Brian Lorenzana, aka Krabby Rangoon, reselling is basic economics. Lorenzana works at premier Chicago sneaker and street apparel boutique St. Alfred as a self-proclaimed “associate of the St. Alfred Empire,” and has seen countless trends in his near-lifetime as a gym shoe aficionado. Like most of his kind, the 31-year-old central Illinois native shuns being labeled a collector in lieu of a more matter-of-fact description. “I just really like shoes,” he explains as we chop it up in St. Alfred on a sale Sunday, just before the doors open to the public. By Lorenzana’s estimation, he owns about 600 pairs—599 pairs of sneakers, one pair of boots—so there has to be a bit more to it than simply “liking” shoes. I really like beer, but I don’t drink it by the gallon
“At one time, I had a job that was paying me very well,” says Lorenzana of a four-year stint in dry goods distribution. “I was making a ton of money and didn’t have many expenses, so I was just putting it into sneakers. It was a few pairs of this, a few pairs of that—‘I like this, I like that’—and it just kind of worked out.” His foray into serious sneaker collecting was initially on the reselling tip, starting in early 2000. “It was an easy way to make some extra money, and it gave me a legit reason to obsess about sneakers the way I always wanted to.”
Now in retail, Lorenzana finds himself on the corporate end of the sneaker business, yet he understands the hustle—even as the combination of the internet and the common man merchant changes the models of distribution and effectively affects the bottom line.
“If you can stand in line for an hour and buy a pair of shoes and make $200 profit off that same pair of shoes, I can’t be mad at that,” Lorenzana admits. “I know why kids come in asking for a size 13 and end up taking a size eight. It’s pretty obvious why they’re buying.
“It’s like stocks. I don’t hate on traders, so why would I hate on sneaker sellers? It’s like anything else—supply and demand.”
And as demand grows, it is the shoe companies and not the individual sellers that soften the market, as manufacturers create both supply and marketing hype at a rate far surpassing the taste of the seasoned sneaker junkie. John Gotty, editor of hip-hop blog The Smoking Section and co-owner of defunct online sneaker hub NDemandConceptz, explains via email:
“I think the only real drawback of reselling was that Nike and others saw it and began to saturate things. The quality of material got worse, in ways. One of the keys to being a sneaker head is having the shoe that nobody else has, and Nike took part of that away by flooding stores and areas, giving out too much of what could have been a good idea.”
Gotty cites the Air Jordan Fusion line as an example, jokingly referring to it as “bastardization” in the Tupac-ian sense where, if a company puts out too much material, it tends to take away from the overall impact. “It’s almost out of control,” says Lorenzana, whose first pair of shoes were a no-name Converse knock-off (“K-Mart, middle of the aisle, square bin, five bucks”). “There are a lot of dollars going through the filters of information, so some things you see you probably shouldn’t be seeing in terms of what’s really cool and what’s just out there to make money.”
During the late ’80s and early ’90s, the Japanese were driving the market by scooping up early-model Jordans. “If you wanted something truly vintage,” Gotty writes, “and thus rare and exclusive, eight out of ten times, a Japanese collector was holding it.” Either that or it was in the dark, dank basement of a store in New York or Chicago, or enshrined in Beaverton, Oregon, home of all things Nike. Jordan Is and IIs, specifically Black Toe Is, grey/metallic silver Is, and Carolina blue Sky Jordans were all virtually untouchable. As the years went on, the attention shifted to Nike’s Air Force Ones and Air Max’s, and most recently, Nike SB Dunks.
When Dunks hit, the floodgates opened on not just skateboarding apparel and culture, but on the sneaker market at large. And coupled with the continued reselling potential due to demand from overseas, more and more “collectors” were drawn to the scene, most of them strictly in it for the money. “And now they have the internet,” says Lorenzana, “which is basically the biggest marketing tool since television.”
In the end, however, reselling may be more of a help than a hindrance to the industry by making a wider range of shoes accessible to a greater number of people. A world online brings the marketplace into the home, and more and more—buyer and seller alike—are catching on. For longtime sneaker fiends, the resale game might make their love for kicks a little tougher and spendier, but at the end of the day, it’s just business. Call it survival of the freshest.
“The shoes are out there,” Lorenzana reasons, “they’re attainable. I’ve made my money off sneakers, so if I have to pay a little more, I’m not tripping.”
This Feature is also available in Vapors 49 – The Sneaks Issue
