With the second sneaker event in Belgium last week, sneakers seem to get a lot of attention the last couple of months. Sneaker-A-Fair in Antwerp brought Belgian sneakerheads some of the most exclusive footwear and clothing of the moment. Next to sneakerheads who just wanted to get that coolest-kid-on-the-block pair of kicks, others were there to invest their saved lunch money in shoes.
500 percent profit on sneakers
Not only sneaker events occur more frequently, brands such as Adidas or Nike come up with more limited edition collections than ever. People lining in front of stores isn’t weird these days. There even is an online stock market called StockX to buy and sell sneakers and keep track of the market values of shoes while sipping a Daiquiri on the beach.
Instead of investing in market shares from Apple or Google, sneakers are the new way of making money. The most common example is the recently dropped Nike x Virgil Abloh ‘The Ten series’, of which the Air Jordan 1s price premium is 505.8 percent. The shoes are worth five times what they cost in retail price, and that’s just one of many. Sneakers follow the same basic economic principals, but the resale price is determined by hype and rarity.
