The Botmakers Who Rule the Obsessive World of Streetware
wired.com
wired.com
Then, in the spring of 2014, the company announced a collaboration with Nike on a basketball sneaker called the Foamposite. Supreme had collaborated with sneaker companies for years, but Foamposites were especially prized by sneakerheads. All of a sudden, Supreme had a whole new audience—one already accustomed to limited releases and camping out to get them.
is a glaring error. Supreme has never not been a favored brand of sneakerheads, and that relationship surely didn't start with Odd Future or some recent Nike collaboration. It goes all the way back to the 90s/early 00s when everybody on Niketalk was pairing box logo tees with their vintage Air Maxes and, contrary to the assertions in the article, all these brands (Supreme, Stussy, Freshjive, etc) were transitioning away from being purely skate/surf focused and starting down the streetwear path they've been on ever since.
And while Supreme never produced any shoes themselves, for many years neither did A Bathing Ape (and the BAPEsta's and their collabs with Adidas were hardly a core part of their business). Nevertheless BAPE is also a brand that utilized the same hype+scarcity model and has always been associated with sneakerhead culture.
The fact remains that anyone who self-identifies as a sneakerhead has known about and most likely worn Supreme for a decade or two. This is not a new development. The new buyers (and the fact that you tend to see more and more Supreme out in the world and on social media) aren't a result of the subculture finding a new obsession. Rather, what was once a niche has gone way mainstream, and tons of people who were never associated with sneaker culture have become interested in the trend.
To wit, by the time the Supreme Foamposites mentioned in the article were released in 2014, many dedicated sneakerheads would have argued that Supreme was completely played out, usurped by herbs, normals and—shudder—teenagers. (Then in 2015 they all went out and bought the camo Jordan 5 collab anyway.)
I've been a skater most of my life. I was completely perplexed when a bunch of the guys I skate with regularly suddenly became sneakerheads almost overnight.
This explains a LOT.
But there was a history of some of skateboarding's most iconic figures wearing Nikes, particularly Jordan 1s but also Blazers and Dunks, in the 80s and early 90s. And it turned out that if you took a Dunk Low, overstuffed the tongue, and added some Nike cushioning tech (bonus points for stitching a Chocolate logo on the heel: https://www.kicksonfire.com/nike-sb-skateboarding-releases/n... ), it fit in just fine with the Osirises of the world that were popular at that time, or classics like the eS Koston, and performed at least as well, if not better (while, critically, not appearing to be built for performance at all).
To your point, Nike quickly leveraged that "vintage cool" aspect that only they could offer, plus collaborations with artists like Geoff McFetridge who had credibility among skaters (and maybe more importantly, among photographers and videographers who shot them), to finally convince skaters that they could wear Nikes without turning into a jock or a dork.
This is so funny. I remember loving those shoes, but every manufacturer thought super cushy tongues were the way to go in that era. Every time we got a new pair, my buddies and I would take a few hours and razorblade them open, pull out all nearly all the stuffing and then sew them back up.
Apparently they finally caught on and stopped making those horrendously huge tongues.
Now the pendulum has swung all the back in the other direction. All these years later, Koston is signed to Nike, and his pro-model basically just looks like a running shoe: http://store.nike.com/us/en_us/pd/sb-koston-max-mens-skatebo...
tldr; smart young people who happen to discover a very Luddite community and applied tech to buy up product and re-sell.
Can't be shut down cause brands will lose face if they "care."
Most scripts are either headless chrome instances using phantom is or selenium.
The one I built years ago was just a chrome extension with some options.
Some are iOS apps with a web view and objected JavaScript.
I would think that using regular HTTP requests is better/more popular then running a headless browser for this kind of work. cUrl, Python Requests, etc.
These don't need a headless browser.
What you're saying makes sense if you're looking at a handful of sites, but it doesn't scale very well compared to a universal solution for monitoring several retailers at once. It's definitely the more wasteful solution, if you are concerned about bandwidth and resource consumption, though.
again, minimal sophistication is required to dominate. most of the developers are not doing deep exploration. you just need to be faster than someone moving a mouse or using an auto-fill script.
That or take it back out of band in a way bots can't easily overcome like 2fa tied to a device the customer can't or won't give up. I.E. Sell a supreme watch that generates FIDO codes from an enclaved 2fa seed. I suppose you'll need to manually trigger inputs as well just to prevent someone parking a webcam on their watch. At some point you'll add enough delay the quoted 19 seconds for 38 orders will become impossible. You don't need to add too much complexity; just enough to make it impractical for the bots to compete with customers.
You could also add randomness by making people accept one use codes for grab bags of items. They'd have to preregister for whatever items they might want but then it's accept or reject the offer in a timed window. Up the risk factor enough and perhaps a human will want to make a decision rather than leave it to a bot.
And one more idea: co-opt and co-brand: sell a line of botmaker branded gear sold by the winner of a botting contest. Take input from botters on how to raise the bar.
Basically, all of your other ideas have been implemented by someone at sometime.
The brand is already hyper-exclusive and doing extremely well, and I didn't get the impression from the article that there is any concern about the bots.
Perhaps these people are fine doing what they're doing, and don't need to grow, grow, grow the brand. Perhaps it's Silicon Valley that should be learning some lessons here...
The whole thing is extremely William Gibson: limited edition almost-secret branded products plus high-tech. Even the use of Futura is something Gibson would put in as a detail.
Maybe I could create a bot that actually buys from knockoffs from a site that I run.
I think there is also the "following passion and money is an after thought"
The offline equivalent with e.g. Black Friday is similar, except you pay with time by waiting in line instead of with money.
If Porsche made most of their money from branded apparel, they'd probably have a different pricing strategy.
Quite the opposite, if anything; the exclusivity of the halo product increases the (perceived) value of the merch.
Margin is very high on their cars, so there is no way they're making anywhere close to most of their money through branded merchandise.
Contrast that with the Music industry. They did about $15 billion in music sales, and only about $8 billion in concert revenue in 2015.
Musicians do make a significant portion of their money from concert revenue, but musicians aren't the primary drivers of ticket prices.
Anyone know how stop yourself from mis-valuating companies and products just because you yourself doesn't find value in it?
At least in market economies, it's literally what someone will pay for a thing, which depends on a whole confluence of taste, feeling, circumstance, and Maslow's pyramid.
In this case, unavailability is part of the pricing. Not only is it expensive, but it's difficult to buy at all!
(The related question of "how do I find people who want to spend lots of money on shoes" is much harder)
Thanks,
Box logo hooded sweatshirt, black
Retail: $148