StockX Is a Stock Market for Nikes and Rolexes
wsj.com
wsj.com
https://old.reddit.com/r/Sneakers/comments/9tqfv6/i_received...
https://old.reddit.com/r/Sneakers/comments/9uqafs/stockx_sen...
https://old.reddit.com/r/Sneakers/comments/9jaj4r/exposing_s...
Can't be a good thing for people to think that about a company.
https://niketalk.com/threads/what%E2%80%99s-it-like-to-work-...
> The only decent song they
> played was ruff ryders anthem.
> My coworkers were arrogant and
> unfriendly. Imagine a bunch of
> clowns that only rock off whites
> or yeezy’s.
Then again...
> They quickly examine the shoe,
> check the bottoms and inside to
> make sure its not worn, sniff it,
> and put the green tag on it.
> sniff it
Lowest ask: $230, Highest bid: $425
At first glance this is backwards because "buy low sell high". Then I realized those prices includes all sizes. So if you look at each size it makes sense:
Size 12: $233 ask, $215 bid
Size 16: $572 ask, $425 bid
The ticket/graphs show sales at all sizes, which is useless as an indicator of trends at the sizes you want/have.
First off all my sneakers are legit and purchased straight from the company (adidas from adidas.com, nikes from nike.com, etc). I tried setting up a website to sell my sneakers and I didn't fare well as nobody really trusts some random site.
Stockx legitimized my selling, taking care of that entire issue. I get less money than I would through direct sales but I have zero legwork. I automated the process so as soon as I receive product, it's posted on stockx for sale. When sold, I simply print the shipping label and take it to the UPS store.
I know that there will always be issues with legitimacy but if they continue making it easier for legit sellers to move product, we'll crowd out the scammers who don't have nearly as much volume. Authenticating a pair of shoes shouldn't take that long. When releases happen, stockx gets a large number of the same exact shoe. They can compare one sellers to anothers and see if there are differences. If I send in 10 pairs of Yeezys that are legit, they'll be able to spot the 1 pair someone sent in that isn't the same.
Also in regards to Mr. Lubers statement about restocking. It's less common than you think and very rare sneakers are often never restocked at the level necessary to destroy demand. In fact, in some instances a company will put out a rare sneaker years later (Jordan Brand calls these "retros") and unfortunately the quality has slipped over the years. So retros that are worse quality remakes of older models can raise the valaue of originals. I usually sell unsold pairs before restocks happen as it brings the value of them back to really profitable levels.
No troubles with goat.com, so they get my business instead.
What purity? You're running a resale market for shoes that are scarce in the same way rare Magic cards are scarce: entirely at the whim of the company. That's what supply-and-demand is like when there's a monopoly on supply!
The trichotomy I use is investment, speculation, and depreciating asset. Examples of the first would be stocks in a publicly traded company or an investment property with positive cashflow. Examples of the second would be cryptocurrencies, trading cards, or rare automobiles. Examples of the third would be consumer goods or commonplace automobiles.
It really grinds my gears when someone says something like "You need to invest in a good gaming PC." No, that's not an investment. It's not even speculation. It falls squarely into the depreciating asset (i.e. worst) category. You're guaranteed to lose more and more money on that over time, until it loses all value.
1) The "distributed ownership" bit – purchase shares representing fractional ownership of something.
2) The "collaborative price finding" bit – use liquidity and misc market forces to find the market price of most things in a fast, continuous, and least painful way.
You're talking about 1, which yes, totally irrelevant. They're talking about 2, which is very relevant.
I'll concede that if you want to be pedantic about semantics, "market" is better than "stock market", but would counter that people think of a "market" as a place where you go to buy lettuce, rather than a conceptual price-finding environment. The stock market concept better matches this abstraction in laypeople's minds.
In even more obvious cosmetic comparisons, the word "Stock" is in embedded in the company name "StockX", and when you go to the "stockx.com" url, there's a ticker of live shoe prices scrolling sideways similar to the traditional stock market displays. The landing webpage also bills itself as, "The Stock Market of Things".
The "stock market" analogy (however flawed it is) is clearly intended to connect to laypeople and not meant to pass a vocabulary test by college econ professors.
Its more like the journalist and developer knows how to make a product relatable. Take notes.
If it's a secondary market like Ebay, say so. That's much more straightforward.
Getting to this point would have required reading past the headline.
In the early days their authenticators took great care to verify every item that came in and they were proud of the service they provided. It sounds like they have had a tough time scaling this part of the business.
The whole point of an exchange is the things being traded are fungible.
I see lots of rolxes being traded, but are they real? have they been used? are they grey imports? I don't see how you're supposed to trust anything thats on there.
Sorry if this was addressed in the article, but there was a paywall to read.
* Counterfeit expertise. Counterfeits are common with high-end sneakers.
* Presentation focused on shoes and not goods. Why is this shoe important amongst the many shoes available?
* Superior search and discovery.
Tracking sneaker values has long been Mr. Luber’s obsession. In the late 2000s, he was a strategy analyst at IBM in New York who spent his nights trawling eBay for data on how much sought-after shoes were selling for on the secondary market. He compiled those figures into Campless, a sort of Kelly Blue Book for sneaker-resale value. But Mr. Luber wasn’t satisfied with eBay. His beefs weren’t limited to the bad photos that sellers posted or their habit of selling fakes. What really bugged him was the absence of price standardization. One dealer might peddle a pair of Nike Dunks for $100 and another might list the same shoes for $300. Mr. Luber envisioned a more orderly market, with a New York Stock Exchange-style ticker, that would make the value of a pair of sneakers transparent, in real time. When those Dunks sold for $100, everyone on the market would know about it, thus forcing other sellers to knock their prices down to the going rate.
Around that same time, Dan Gilbert, the founder of mortgage lending company Quicken Loans, noticed that his teenage son was flipping sneakers on eBay for profit. Intrigued, Mr. Gilbert founded a research team on sneaker reselling who discovered what Mr. Luber was working on. Mr. Gilbert bought Campless in 2015 and the pair joined forces (along with COO Greg Schwartz), launching StockX, “the stock market of things,” based in Mr. Gilbert’s hometown of Detroit in February 2016.
Further mitigating risk for the buyer, StockX acts as a middleman for payment and does not release proceeds of the sale to the seller until the shoes have been verified. Carlos Chavez, 34, an engineer and part-time sneaker seller in Los Angeles, prefers using StockX (or GOAT, a newer rival app) to eBay, after he experienced a “chargeback,” in which PayPalfroze his proceeds of a sale for two weeks because the buyer used a counterfeit payment.
“I’ve sold on both eBay and Grailed but the big reason I prefer StockX for shoes is to not be scammed,” said Mr. Chavez, who in September used his funds from flipping sneakers to finance a vacation to Oaxaca with his wife. In a statement, an eBay spokesperson noted that it offers a money-back guarantee if a buyer identifies a counterfeit and that since 1998 it has had the Verified Rights Owner Program (VeRO), which allows brands themselves to more easily report fake items on eBay. Further, in October 2017 eBay launched “eBay Authenticate” which inspects and validates luxury items such as Prada handbags and Rolex watches.
Authentication and price sales transparency.