It looks like nobody told the sneaker resale market that there was a recession. The $19 billion industry is booming amid the pandemic and shows no sign of slowing down as sneakerheads make their way to secondary marketplaces such as StockX to cop their coveted kicks. Scott Cutler, StockX CEO, joined Yahoo Finance to discuss the sneaker market and retail trends leading up to Black Friday.
Cutler tells Yahoo Finance more and more consumers are choosing to shop from the comfort of their own homes online.
“As you know, all online shopping has been accelerating over the years, but the pandemic has caused shifts for consumer behavior that, quite frankly, accelerate maybe ten years of e-commerce activity just in the last couple of months. So sales will primarily be online this holiday season and with consumer preferences changing more people will be shopping on the secondary market.”
Cutler says that the holiday trends going forward are and will be driven by a new generation of customers.
“For us 75% of consumers are under the age of 35; these are the trendsetters, these are the ones defining what’s hot and what’s not.”
Cutler notes one such trend is consumers going to the secondary market before primary channels.
“There’s a convergence happening between sneakers and fashion, and now even new categories such as electronics and what’s happening in this is that there’s so much demand for these products that consumers are now going to the secondary markets as their first place to purchase because the secondary markets and platforms like StockX provide those customers access to products that you can’t find from the brand or from retailers and they trade live in marketplaces like ours.”
Cutler tells Yahoo Finance that the notion of getting access to those products for these consumers has been a big driver for this convergence between primary and secondary in the mind of the consumer.
According to Cutler, Nike’s (NKE) Jordan brand was king of the resale market in 2019, a trend which he believes will continue in 2020 with the Jordan I silhouette leading the charge. The StockX CEO expects the Jordan I retro mocha black toe, which patterned after the Travis Scott Jordan I, to be a top seller.
Off the feet, he expects Telfar bags, such as the one seen on the shoulder of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and Sony’s (SNE) Playstation 5 and Microsoft’s (MSFT) Xbox Series X consoles to be hot sellers as well.
Reggie Wade is a writer for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter at @ReggieWade.
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