The Fans Who Kicked Sneakers Into the Big Leagues

April 2023

Would a kid in the 80s have been pumped to hear this description of sneakers? How did we get here?

Cowen estimates that by 2030 the resale market alone will be worth $30 billion. In context, the entire sneaker market will hit $120 billion by 2026, up from $79 billion in 2020.

What fueled this dramatic rise in value from functional footwear to capitalism in kicks? The answer lies in the power of community to transform everyday experiences into deeply meaningful objects of desire. It was sneakerheads who imbued rare sneakers with cultural significance which led to market opportunities for resellers.

As the first wave was cresting, the big sneaker brands began to amplify the beat on the streets. In 1984, Nike launched the Air Jordan, turbocharging the celebrity endorsement of athletic shoes into the mass market. The final wave is digital, driving up resale values and encouraging brands to curate their heritage as defined by the values of the sneakerheads.

Seer recognizes these phases as structurally similar to the typical genesis of authentic communities across cultures, in sports, fashion and the arts. The first phase is essential because it grounds the history of collecting sneakers in a time and space which was formative for the individuals embedded in the culture.

Whether they were hip-hop fans sporting Adidas Shell Toes with prison laces or soccer fans on European terraces in Adidas Sambas, the visceral power of the crowds around them imbued their choice of shoes with the ‘spirit of the age’. Next, their formative experience required validation by a powerful authority outside the original proto-community. In the case of sneakers, this came in the form of none other than Michael Jordan himself courtesy of Nike.

Finally, the community manifests its own self-regulated, organic hierarchy, with an inner circle of trusted experts and influencers, a larger group of motivated collectors and resellers, and a wider diaspora of followers who subscribe to the values of the inner circles. This acceptance of hierarchy (the super-fan pyramid) is integral to robust, authentic communities, especially online, where even the biggest brands must bow to superior sneakerhead wisdom.

It’s notable that sneakerheads have a name for those who they see as a parasitic enclave within the community — these are the hypebeasts. Hypebeasts are seen as freeloaders who don’t contribute to the culture in any meaningful way.

In the words of one of the focus group cohort:

The construction of boundaries — those who are in and those who are out — is indicative of the health of an authentic community. In the case of sneakerheads, the deep layers of meaning that have built up over the years in multiple subcultures can only be interpreted by those with an encyclopedic knowledge of a 50-year history, from original Chucks to Converse X DRKSHDW.

In essence, the distinctiveness of the sneakerhead community is what adds billions of dollars of value to the sneaker market. By creating boundaries that require significant social investment to cross, the community builds symbolic value that can then be exploited in the ‘real economy’.

Seer’s study of the intersection of fandom and community leads us to the conclusion that market opportunity can only spring from organic boundary-making groups. If you want your brand to have value, derived from real values, you must nurture and curate groups who have been manifesting those values since ‘back in the day’. Real fans can detect a hypebeast from a million miles away no matter what they have on their feet or in their feed.

Related posts:

It gradually becomes the fact that TikTok knows me better than myself. It not only knows what kind of content I like to watch, but more surprisingly, it can predict what types of videos could be my…

I can still vividly remember pictures of African kids with their round and bloated belly sticking out. As a kid, I did not know what was happening. Why is their belly swollen? Why are they so skinny…

As we know that XGBoost is an ensemble learning technique, particularly a BOOSTING one. Let’s go a step back and have a look at “Ensembles”. Ensembles in layman are nothing but grouping and trust me…