On the afternoon of August 28th, Hong Kong native David sat in this open space. He sweated a lot and dressed as if he had to run to the basketball court for 48 minutes. Ten shoeboxes around him are Air Jordan's limited collections that he has collected for years and are waiting to change hands. One of the shoe boxes also put a piece of paper on it. In English it reads: "Look for a pair of AJ 1 year 2015 reissue - Call me! My name is David." Sneaker Con, the largest sneaker trade show in the United States, entered Asia for the first time and was held at the AsiaWorld-Expo near the Hong Kong Airport. According to the organizers' rough statistics, the audience was about 6500. Among them, 40% came from Hong Kong, 30% came from mainland China, and the rest came from other parts of Asia. Picture from SneakerNews “This activity is awesome, Paris Fashion Week in the industry.†Before joining the Taobao store Delong Sports, 21-year-old SneakerHead Su Xinyu had run a sneaker called Beijing-Sneakerhead from the media. "Today, we sold a pair of comets, about 13,000 yuan. An Indonesian, who did not know how to come in during the morning's exhibition, grinds me one morning. The most expensive 10 pairs of shoes/pictures in the sub-market in the second quarter of 2017 from StockX statistics from Highsnobiety In addition to Ray, Alan also invited several popular YouTube sneaker video bloggers including Qias Omar to the scene. He described his secret to Sneaker Con as “a unique network of relationships.†In addition to not selling display shoes, the most expensive Nike LeBron 6 Stewie Griffin Sample PE/picture courtesy of SneakerNews SoleAddictt UNDS/Images from SneakerNews Off-White X Nike Air Jordan 1 Wu Ming Dan Yang Jerry (right) is identifying sneakers/pictures from SneakerNews The hat on the right is the "boss" / picture from SneakerNews Allen Kuo The Sneaker Circle is rapidly expanding and undergoing a dramatic chemical reaction. The preferences of new and old people, dressing up, and information receiving channels are all very different. In the interview with the “Curiosity Dailyâ€, owner of the property company with more than 50 pairs of old sneakers said that he was purely exhibiting his own collection. “The most expensive pair has spent 16 million euros.†This time, He hopes to find like-minded people, but he could not find it. Song Sui collection of old sneakers/pictures from SneakerNews Fiber Glass Seat,Carbon Fiberglass Chair,Fiber Glass For Racing Car Seat,Black Fiber Glass Seat Ruian Jia Beir Auto Parts Co.,Ltd. , https://www.jbrseat.com
If it was not Typhoon "Tiange" that had attacked Hong Kong two days before the event, Hong Kong had the number 10 typhoon and the number of flights canceled in five years. People may be more.
As long as you pay 233 Hong Kong dollars for the tickets, you will be able to witness the most rare pair of shoes in the footwear within 7 hours of the show. Any one of them will immediately be looted if it is re-sold; even if there is no application You can also bring your own collection to the official booth of 1,500 Hong Kong dollars for a table. Like David, you can sit in the trading area of ​​the Trading Pit for free and share.
Shoemakers, or SneakerHeads, all have their own exchange passwords. Proficiently recognizing a pair of shoes and understanding the stories behind them are basic lessons. Xiao Yunfu, on behalf of Beijing's sneakers media Ulsum, came to report this event. He told the "Curizens Daily": "The Ray Allen player's version over there is very powerful, there is Paul, and the dark blue Nike Zoom Kobe V' The Laker Scoring Title' is one of the One of One shoes." 
Sneaker Con Queuing at the entrance with a picture of a Quan Zhilong concert poster / Pictures from SneakerNews 
"The comet" refers to the custom-designed NBA player Nate Robinson's limited edition sold in 2009. The retail price was 1,750 yuan, and the country only had 80 pairs. Today's resale price has already increased by 8 times. Delong Sports's shop placed a total of 5 pairs of fluorescent green "Platos", including a pair of display-only Nate Robinson signed version, "all of the bosses have come back a little," said Su Xinyu.
Most Sneakerheads have pit stories similar to Su Xinyu's: “It was initially turned into a Sneakerhead because I started playing basketball when I was schooling, so I came into contact with basketball shoes.†Zhang Long, chief editor of Long7, a media for shoes, told Curiosity Daily. Described the relationship between Sneakers: "I think it is a way, like that kind of lesson, to get a housewife get a cake or something. Is it really to teach you to make a cake? It is not, it is to let you know some people."
And a small number of them will change from enthusiasts and shoe collectors to shoe dealers and shoe media, and they often think that they are involved in shaping the culture.
Similar to Apple, Sneakerhead is willing to spend a few times the retail price to buy a limited number of models. For the sports brand, Sneakerhead is the most important group of consumers. The new Jordan shoes sold at 9:00am every Saturday are within the circle. The main currency. Tens of thousands of shoes immediately appeared on the shelves of private shoe stores, eBay and Taobao. The price increase ranged from a few hundred dollars to several times, depending on the extent to which the shoes were in short supply.
In the United States alone, according to 2015 statistics of the shoe resale trading website StockX.com, this large submarket can reach US$1.2 billion. About 9 million pairs of shoes are resold every year and generate US$380 million in profits. From the iconic Air Jordan 3 Black Cement, Nike spent 29 years building the rules of the game. In the words of Josh Luber, Chief Executive Officer of StockX.com, “This is all about supply and demand.†
Sneaker Con is an activity founded on such a subculture group. The ratio of buyers and sellers here is very different. Most of them are male audiences. In stark contrast to the large number of girls who are queued up for the right to participate in the Quan Zhilong concert on August 28.
In 2009, Russian-born brothers Alan Vinogradov and Barris Vinogradov, who grew up in the United States, teamed up with Chinese-born Yu-Ming Wu, a native of Taishan, Guangdong, to host the first Sneaker Con at the Times Square Arts Center in New York, with a ticket of US$10. A booth is asking for $100, and more than 1,000 people have arrived from Westchester, Long Island, and New Jersey.
Prior to this idea, the Vinogradov brothers operated a limited edition sneaker website osenaker.com in New York, and Yu-Ming was the founder of the famous sneaker media SneakerNews, whose Instagram account currently has 6.5 million followers. At the time, they realized that one of the sites was linked incorrectly and that each other's office was only 3 blocks away.
In an interview with The Curiosity Daily, Alan said that he did not agree with Josh Luber that everything in the shoe ring was likened to the stock market. "Gold is gold, you know it's expensive; gasoline is gasoline, and you fill it up." Fuel tanks, but shoes are a culture, not a commodity.â€
He went on to explain: “Reselling is part of the shoe culture. If anyone deny this, they don’t understand the culture of shoes. Just like Instagram and retail stores, reselling shoes is a very important tool for shoe traders. (reseller) is the marketing and marketing of the sports brand."
"As long as they are not selling fake shoes, I have no opinion."
Alan began to sell shoe shoes in 2003. He said that people in the United States thought it was not very good. But today, the shoe dealer is very cool in the United States. "You are the boss."
At the time of this speech, the honored guest NBA star Ray Allen, who was invited to the event, was interacting with the fans at the scene and burst into cheers. 
The ability to access special channels and shoes is also an important indicator of seniority in the Sneakerhead Circle.
At Sneaker Con, the most expensive and most cherished shoes are usually sampled by illegal sources. At the Kix Dreams booth in Mong Kok, you can find the AJ11 "Cool Grey Low" sample in the world with only 3 pairs. The other two pairs are in Michael Jordan's hands; you can also see the Nike Dunk Low SB that has never been officially released at SoleAddictt UNDS. "Freddy Krueger Ghost Street"; The most expensive pair of samples in the audience is the Nike LeBron 6 Stewie Griffin Sample PE, priced at $35,000. 
As for the Off-White X Nike joint-venture AJ1, which has just been released on August 23 and has attracted a lot of attention, it also appeared on the Taobao shop “Prairie Sports†booth. Many people asked the booth owner for the source and price. The answer was “ Not to sell."
Alan's argument is that people are paying for things that “someone else can get and I can't†and a pair of limited-sized shoes represent some kind of access and authority.
If you can get the goods before the sale of shoes, in the industry will be called "channel king." It's hard to say this is a good word, because these shoes usually come from the inside of the brand.
The most serious one occurred in April 2014. FBI agents raided the home of Tung Ho, the product promotion manager of the former Nike basketball division, and seized 1,941 pairs of samples and hundreds of thousands of cash. Tung Ho and his predecessor, Kyle Yamaguchi, had been using their positions to order sample shoes from Nike's Chinese factory for the past eight years before being investigated, transported to Nike's Oregon headquarters, and sold to shoe dealers.
“2012 to 2014 was a peak for Nike. It was these samples that we played at the highest level. Because the prices are the highest and the rarest.â€
Telling us this story is Wu Ming Danyang who was born in 1993. Compared to this name, he is more commonly known as the English name Jerry. After studying from high school in the United States, Jerry was deeply influenced by Sneaker culture. From the beginning of the university, he basically participates every time Sneaker Con, not a stall or a shoe purchase. "I've got a lot of it every time, 80 doubles and 100 doubles. I've known Alan slowly." Now that Jerry is a member of the Sneaker Con team, the "Free Appraisal" area in the middle of the field identifies the audience who bought the shoes. true and false. 
“A lot of times you have to look at fake shoes to know what it looks like.†Jerry, wearing a Supreme baseball cap, is checking for a pair of Yeezy 350s. He first presses hard on the material of the Boost sole, and then opens the tongue and checks the shoes. , "The standard for fake shoes is usually a bit oblique."
The pair of Yeezy who used it to identify was a Korean boy who did not look over 16 years old. He was surrounded by a group of friends. After learning that the shoes were genuine, he was quite satisfied and shouted to Jerry: "Can you say legit for me?" - This word meaning "legal" represents the "genuine" in the shoe ring.
Jerry feels that Nike's hot submarket has been declining since 2014. When Sample shoes with a resale price of 20,000 yuan are in vogue, newcomers who have just entered the circle can hardly quickly become a top collector of shoes. According to the figures disclosed by Josh Luber, as of January 2015, Nike’s share in the secondary market reached a staggering 96%, adidas only 1%, and after two and a half years, Adidas’ market share became 45%.
Deon Point, the creative director of the Street Trends Store Concepts in the United States, said in an interview not long ago that Yeezy’s momentum is still in its infancy and that it has not made any significant adjustments to the design, materials and colors of the surface, and there is ample room for growth.
The obvious fact is that in Sneaker Con, younger 20-year-olds usually turn a blind eye to the Jordan shoes displayed in the transparent cupboards. Yeezy is the place they flock to - a Yeezy-only booth is played by several Hong Kong players. In fact, the booth advertises the “We buy all Yeezy†advertising, and the leader is only 15 years old. 
The emergence of Yeezy gave newcomers the chance to enter the market. Under the stimulation of new interests, the market became bigger and became crazy. Allen Kuo, a Chinese cargo king who got a fire on the US social network this year, got 80 pairs of Yeezy 350 in advance. In an interview with the media, he claimed that he was not SneakerHead who loves shoes. He just wanted to make money; the other was called Yeezy Mafia ( The organization of the coconut mafia claimed that it was composed of "Sneaker shoes dealers who have computer skills". They can always predict Yeezy's sale inventory and get a lot of goods in advance. The official website painted a lock and said "Only for members. open".
During the hottest period of NMD sales, many shoe dealers did make a fortune. “I remember very clearly that at that time, I also looked for a person in South Korea who took dozens of pairs of Tokyo colors. In 1800, the market price was 2100.†The manager of the exhibition running in Shenzhen tells us that “the most money is still earned. At that time, several buyers in South Korea had an international student there. In 3 months, they bought a Maserati."
32-year-old Guan Weinong now runs his own reselling business on the WeChat platform. He has a member group and the one-hundred-and-a-half agent is eligible to get goods from him if he only pays 188 yuan.
Prior to this trip, Mokumi was a sports teacher. The process of enjoying the shoes was no different from other shoe fans. Last year, Guan Meinong learned through a friend's introduction that a Hong Kong sports retail store was responsible for replenishing “channels†so that they could get shoes at a very low price. “At the beginning of this year, a Nike clearance store was opened near my home. There are a total of five stores in the country.†With the convenience of the home logistics company's warehouse, his inventory can be maintained at around 2,000 pairs of shoes, with a monthly sales of up to 100. Million, almost par with a Nike retail store.
"Nike and Adi were fighting in the past two years. Many products, which had previously been retired to discount stores within 3-6 months, now basically retired to discount stores in a month. It can't finish on the shelf. Two or three hundred running shoes. It's almost like Li Ning, but you wear Nike."
Every time the season is discounted, the tube ink will go to a large number of goods. His circle of friends updated 20 new "new shelves" news every day, and claimed that he is the lowest price of the entire network, lower than Taobao.
Changes in the Internet environment have had greater impact on these shoe sellers than they thought. When Taobao's traffic is increasingly concentrated in large stores, the small store's living space becomes very small. Jerry recently planned to close his Taobao shop. "For example, a pair of red and black 11, I put 2900 on Taobao, big stores sell 4000 (still sold off), you can not."
In extreme circumstances, many Taobao stores with high attention need not have physical inventory at all. As long as customers come to the door, they can quickly transfer goods from other small stores. This kind of shop is called "portal dealer" and the transferred goods are called "port goods."
The risk brought by the transfer of goods is that the source of the goods is not transparent, and it is not uncommon for accidental incorporation of counterfeit goods.
"Those big (batch) goods will die if they are real stocks." Ink management calculated the amount of money. If the price of a pair of "stock goods" with a purchase price of 300 yuan goes into 2000 pairs, it would be 600,000. "You think Jordan has so many styles. Would you dare to take it? Now that the market is not good, every large store has the same model as a listed company. Multi-shareholder system." 
MJ McConnell, the owner of Kickscrew, the largest sponsor of the 10 tables bought by Sneaker Con, said that recently the economy is not good. “In the past, each pair of shoes from Jordan was higher than the original price of several hundred, one thousand pieces were sold, and now Discount out.†Kickscrew has been established for nearly 5 years and currently has Taobao, Tmall International and its own website. "Let's wait for double eleven and double 12. We have probably sold 450,000 pairs of shoes."
When Jordan shoes are not selling well and are frequently discounted, shoe traffickers can only attract customers with low prices, and thus find out a sales method similar to gambling.
For example, a Nike official website has just launched new shoes. The shoe dealer will directly sell it at a discount of 60%. “Pay the money first, wait for the official website to get a 60% discount, and then take the 30-day return policy for the original price.â€
Some analysts believe that Nike must now control Jordan's shoe re-engraving speed, perhaps to save the decline in the secondary market. Its recently announced cooperation with Off-White is generally considered to be a booster.
"Nike's sales are so dependent on the influence of NBA players. It would be a good thing to associate with a designer with a popular fashion brand." Adam Padilla, co-founder of brand consultancy Brandfire, was recently embraced by trend media. Said Hyperbeast in an interview.
But carefully identifying the design concept of this collaboration, you can still feel that the 10 double-branded models reconstructed by Virgil Abloh still emphasize the existing technology and design system of the sports brand, instead of creating a brand new one like Yeezy. style. 
Alan Vinogradov revealed that they are planning to go to more overseas markets to do Sneaker Con, because compared to 8 years ago, “The biggest difference is that the boundaries of the sneaker culture have disappeared.†New York is no longer the center of the world, Chinese stars are on the top A pair of shoes, in the twinkling of an eye, can stir up high prices in the secondary market. “Today people think of Sneaker and they will say that the United States and China are the biggest markets.†Last year Sneaker Con made its first trip to London. Next year, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Germany’s Cologne are all under consideration.
Near the end of the show, David said that he only sold a pair of West Nots, which was sold for 2,000 Hong Kong dollars. If you count the tickets, you won't make much money, but he is still very happy - whether it is because his "spread" is surrounded by many people, or met with a number of far more than usual - luck If so, someone may "call" him. 