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Air Jordan's are the new baseball cards for kids (1 Viewer)

Mario Kart

Footballguy
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/young-traders-market-where-air-190434266.html

With sneakers slung around their shoulders and pockets full of cash, young boys huddle in hotel ballrooms and high school gyms, shouting and bartering as if they belong on a trading room floor.


“What do you want for them?” John Leonardo asked at one recent event in New Jersey.

“What’s your offer?” someone hollered back.

In a flurry of transactions, John, who is only 13 years old, bought, sold or exchanged 20 pairs of designer basketball sneakers and walked away with seven, four more pairs than he started with. His collection’s retail value climbed to $1,155 from $340.

John, an eighth-grade student from Manalapan, N.J., and thousands of other teenage “sneakerheads” have formed a thriving subculture using Instagram, Facebook and weekend conventions to spot, sell and trade coveted, sometimes limited edition pairs of basketball shoes.

Teenagers who have grown up with eBay and the Internet have learned the art of trading up, sometimes earning a profit in the process.

Jake White, 14, of Freehold, N.J., has 81 pairs in his collection, helped a lot by gifts from his parents. He estimates they’ve spent $11,000 on shoes and could probably make $20,000 if he sold them all. “I know just about everything about sneakers,” he said. “I only wear them in the summer because I don’t want to take down the value of them.”

While the lucrative retail business for sneakers — and the exclusive lines that attract overnight campers outside elite stores — have existed for decades, this teenager-filled marketplace (or high-end sneaker exchange) has spread from city to city in the last few years. It’s the latest phase — one whose staying power is unclear — of the sports footwear craze that began 30 years or so ago when the National Basketball Association forbade Michael Jordan, then a rookie, to wear his Nike Air Jordan 1’s on the court because they didn’t meet the dress code.

To this day, no player’s line comes close to Nike’s Jordan-branded footwear, sales of which reached $2.5 billion last year. Over all, basketball sneaker sales made up $4.5 billion of the total $21 billion athletic shoe business, according to Princeton Retail Analysis.


And the teenage traders attending these conventions know the market, reciting resale values, the buzz of a hot trade and the debut dates for new pairs as easily as others can spit out baseball stats.

Joseph Diorio, 34, the owner of SoleXChange, hosts and sponsors trading events in major cities like New York and Miami and likens the sneaker trading craze to the comic book business. “I think collecting sneakers will live on forever because there is a story behind every sneaker,” Mr. Diorio said.

At a convention Mr. Diorio sponsored last month in the Hotel Pennsylvania in Manhattan, hundreds of traders carted shoe boxes in duffel bags and backpacks into a 40,000-square-foot space. At many of these events, held nearly weekly around the country, those who pay a $25 entry fee to enter as traders can lug in a maximum of five pairs to barter or sell and then generally earn from $300 to $800, depending on the venue. To get display space like a real vendor, attendees can pay about $125 for a three-person table — and average a share of $2,000 to $4,000 a day, with highs reaching nearly $20,000.

The mostly male, mostly teenage hawkers at these conventions may have little in common but their envy for other collectors’ wares. They wander up and down aisles holding sneakers high on top of boxes carried aloft like pizza pies, or set up shop on the floor with a stacked tower of shoes on display. They have quickly learned the art of negotiating and have made friends they would never have met otherwise.

“These kids make 10 to 12 transactions, and before you know it, they have a $2,000 pair of sneakers or a real nice collection of shoes,” said Suraj Kaufman, the owner of two popular Nike footwear stores in New Jersey called Sneaker Room, in Bayonne and Jersey City. His stores have more than 66,000 followers on Facebook. “It’s really amazing to see.”

At the smaller convention attended by John Leonardo and a few hundred teenagers, Nicole Cavallero, a language arts teacher at Pine Brook School in Manalapan and the mother of a 12-year-old trader, watched as shoes switched hands quickly.

“This scene is absolutely insane, but I know that this is all the rage,” she said, adding that she gave her son, Dominick, and one of his friends a lesson in bargaining on the way to an event. “As parents we need to encourage them not to be taken advantage of but also to get their money’s worth.”

“Reselling basketball sneakers has become a cultlike atmosphere,” said Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst of the NPD Group. “No one is watching over all this money changing hands. So it seems like it’s being done underground, but it’s perfectly legal. And it’s exciting to them because it’s a real form of income.”

Teenagers know what draws top dollar and are careful to walk like ducks so as not to crease new shoes they plan to sell quickly. (The collectors look for their sizes to wear the shoes, and men’s sizes are more valuable.) At these events, experts check the soles, tongues and other marks to authenticate shoes. At the convention at the Hotel Pennsylvania, cleaning stations were also available.

While money or shoes change hands successfully on these Saturday afternoons, trades using Instagram and other social media have become so popular that a new shoe — ordered online with the purchase snapped via Instagram — may not have even arrived before it is resold by some enterprising youth. Online and off, business is brisk.

“I can see sneakers becoming even bigger than the baseball card scene,” predicted George Rahor, who teams with his son, Steven, 14, in “Street Heat Sole & Style Expo” events, and who used to run baseball card shows in the 1990s.

Just like the aura around other highly prized collector’s items, sometimes it’s the deal that doesn’t get made that generates the most buzz.

At the Manhattan event last month, one young vendor turned away $98,000 in cash for his Nike Air Yeezy 2 “Red October” sneakers, designed by Kanye West and signed by the artist himself onstage at the Nassau Coliseum in February.

“I know I could buy a house with this kind of money,” said the vendor, Jonathan Rodriguez, 18, of Deer Park, N.Y., who said he planned to enlist in the Air Force. “But I’m a huge Kanye West fan. I can just work to get the money. The only way I’m selling them is if there is a reason that I need to sell or I’m offered life-changing money.”
I think it'd be cool to go to one of these and just watch.

When I was in middle school I had http://sneakernews.com/tag/air-jordan-vi-sport-blue/ and found out recently that they are going to get released late summer. I'm going to look for them and buy a pair. I still have the originals although I don't have the laces or the blue snap lace thing. I think I could get a couple hundred for them although they are kid size.

On this page... http://sneakernews.com/air-jordan-release-dates/ ... these are the upcoming Jordan shoes. I won't buy any of the following but these look pretty cool:

- Jordan Future “Multi-Color” ($185)

- Air Jordan 6 “Carmine” ($170)

- Air Jordan 6 “Cigar” (TBD)

- Air Jordan 14 “Red Suede”

 
I had the first pair of Jordan (parents bought them for me while in Junior High) and I managed to buy a lot of the subsequent pairs. I kept them in the original boxes and when I was in my early 20's, I sold like 4 of them (including the first one) for like $250.00 and used the money to buy Jordan basketball cards.

I really wish I had that first pair back....

 
Sneaker head here... I've collected sneakers since I was a little boy. I had so many unworn kicks in my closet that my wife insisted I bring them to my moms house. I buy them and just put them in my closet, I just love having sneakers.

Between Jordan 1s, 3s, 4s, 5s, 6s, 7s, & 11s I must have close to 100 pairs at my moms and another 20 in my closet. I have some of the re-releases, but a lot of the originals from the 90's. You need to store them right otherwise they get F'd. Like wrapped in saran wrap almost air tight or they get discoloration and cracking. After being stored away for that long, they'll usually get wrecked if you wear them, so they are more collectible then wearable after 10-20 years. Not many people store them right, so the originals get rarer and rarer over the years and in mint condition are worth good money. I wouldn't dream of selling ever. These will be passed down, just like comic books or baseball cards.

 
I had an original pair of pumps. I think I paid $110 at the time which I think is about $6k in today's dollars. I had to eat ramen noodles for a few months just to keep from getting evicted.

Lost them in the Iowa floods of 93.

 
My friend makes a decent buck doing custom paint jobs on Nikes. People drop a couple hundred bucks to have their shoes custom painted; kind of sick. He actually designed a pair of cleats that Courtland Finnegan from St Louis wore this past season.

EDIT: Here they are, they're cleats to match the Throwback jerseys.

 
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My friend makes a decent buck doing custom paint jobs on Nikes. People drop a couple hundred bucks to have their shoes custom painted; kind of sick. He actually designed a pair of cleats that Courtland Finnegan from St Louis wore this past season.

EDIT: Here they are, they're cleats to match the Throwback jerseys.
checked it out, amazing stuff Em

 
Coworker has a storage unit full of 'em, tons of sneakers.

My girlfriend collects Chuck Taylors. I think she's up to 80 or so.

 
Need to dig out my pair of originals. Ebay listings seem to be all over the place, though.

 
My friend makes a decent buck doing custom paint jobs on Nikes. People drop a couple hundred bucks to have their shoes custom painted; kind of sick. He actually designed a pair of cleats that Courtland Finnegan from St Louis wore this past season.

EDIT: Here they are, they're cleats to match the Throwback jerseys.
But you gotta drip it like it's marble cake.

 
So the Jordan XI's are typically the most in demand pairs they make. Every year right before Christmas they rerelease a different color scheme of these and every year there is always at least one death in relation to getting these shoes. It's pretty unbelievable, but if this article is right, at least the right person is dead.

http://m.nydailynews.com/news/crime/ohio-shopper-kills-teen-steal-new-nikes-cops-article-1.2055840
Sounds like 100% justified (morally and legally) self defense:

In front of the mall, the youths spotted the men with the shoes and confronted them, police said. Jabbar pulled out a gun and demanded the men give them the sneakers.

That’s when one of the men pulled out his own concealed weapon and shot the Middletown High School student.

No one else was injured in the shooting. The man had a permit for the gun, police said
 

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