sold out: HOW BOTS AND RESELLERS ARE KILLING STREETWEar culture
The Demand for Supreme
In the world of sneakers, reselling is not a new practice, in fact it has been a serious issue for around 15 years now. In the last decade, the world has gotten very internet savvy and in consequence, shoe releases online are being dominated by bots and resellers instead of the average consumer that ends up actually wearing the shoes. The world is only going to rely on the web more and more from this day forward, and large sneaker and clothing brands need to listen to their loyal customers and put an end to bots and resellers.
One of the most powerful street wear clothing brands in the world is Supreme. Supreme proved its dominance in street wear culture and in the clothing world during the spring season of 2014. Supreme and Nike had a highly anticipated collaboration on the way called the “Supreme x Nike Foamposite”. This shoe was already a big release for Nike even before Supreme put their stamp on it. Supreme redesigned the original Nike Foamposite adding hints of a metallic gold pattern printed on the upper, and released the shoe in both red and black. Days before the Supreme retail store in New York City was set to debut their spring collection on April 3rd (Sanchez, 2015), featuring one of the Holy-Grails of sneakers, customers and resellers began to camp outside the store, hoping to grab themselves a pair.
As the release date approached the line outside of Supreme NYC grew larger and stretched around the block past multiple stores. Security at Supreme was at an all time high, as the crowd grew anxious the night before release day. Late in the night, N.Y.P.D. felt it was time to cancel the release of the sneakers for Supreme, to prevent any further riot-like activities. Supreme was forced to release the shoe online, retailing at $250 per pair. The online release did not draw quite as much attention in the media, but the Supreme website did crash due to all of the traffic on their server because now everyone in the country had a chance to purchase the shoes. Today the Supreme Foamposite can still be sold at ridiculous amounts of up to $1,000. (Sanchez, 2015)
In street wear culture, we have never seen anything quite like this. Supreme continues to drop jaws with each and every release. Lines stretching around the block, many will do whatever it takes to get their hands on anything with the company’s iconic Box Logo stamped on it. This includes waiting in line for hours or days at a time, or even paying someone to do the dirty work for you. (Babcock, 2015)
In Complex’s “Sold Out” documentary film, the Complex team hits the streets of New York City during a 2015 Supreme release, in hopes to find resellers in line and show consumers the strategies they use to purchase large quantities of the brands items, and sell them for a large profit. The profit margin per item is usually in the hundreds of dollars, even with items like a Supreme crow bar, graphic tees, hats, nun chucks, and much more. One shirt referred to as the "Kermit Tee" features Kermit The Frog wearing a Supreme Box Logo tee shirt on the front. "The Kermit Tee" has an average resale price of $500 dollars after retailing in April of 2015 for $44. (Sanchez, 2015) Many resellers refused to answer questions or admit to the act of reselling, because it is frowned upon by the average consumer and the brand itself. Supreme has worked to eliminate its reselling problem by singling out people who may be reselling and refusing to fulfill their order at the door, but that isn’t enough anymore. Many resellers pay others to wait in line for them, so that they can get everything from the release that they are looking for. Supreme imposed an item cap so that each customer can only purchase a certain amount of goods when they reach the inside of the store. This forced resellers to start paying kids hundreds of dollars to wait in line on release day so they could end getting what they want from each release.
The resellers that agreed to proceed with interviews with Complex, seemed to be doing it for the publicity and the screen time. They often shouted out their Instagram accounts or eBay stores to the camera and encouraged people to stop by online. As the composition of the film seemed like it was supposed to portray reselling as a negative practice with most of the questions Complex asked and statements they made, somehow the resellers were able to make it look like what they do to kids and other fans of Supreme was not only ok, but a good thing. Many of the resellers believe they are providing a service to people all over the country and that they are helping people out, but Complex continued to shine light on the ridiculously high prices of the resold items, and the fact that resellers were in fact part of the problem and large reason why many people aren’t able to acquire Supreme clothing. One reseller was asked if he thought the clothing was worth the cost he was charging, he responded, "No where near, but at the end of the day, it's worth whatever a fool is willing to pay for it.". (Sanchez, 2015)