The watch and sneaker collector communities have a lot in common.

Example: highly anticipated sneaker “releases” are made in limited quantities, with tightly controlled distribution, are nearly impossible to purchase at MSRP, and fuel a multi-billion dollar grey market of sneaker flippers.

The sneaker industry has approached the market of hot releases differently than the watch industry.

Using Nike as example (and it is THE example in sneaker culture), the hottest releases are generally “dropped” simultaneously online and in only certain stores. The hottest of these shoes are never in your local mall, just as SS Daytonas aren’t found at the mall jewelers. When certain brick and mortar stores do get pairs, it can often be a single pair in each size.

As for online releases, Nike has a dedicated app called “SNKRS” used exclusively for moderating and facilitating the sale of their most collectible shoe releases. The SNKRS app notifies users of upcoming drop dates and times. When a drop date/time comes, the global sneakerhead community descends upon the app at the moment of release, furiously type in their orders, and hope the mysterious SNKRS “algorithm” bestows a pair upon them... to purchase.

To increase chances of landing a pair, normal buyers may have one or more accounts and devices in order to (they hope but don’t know) increase their chances of “copping.” Nike supposedly allows three accounts/devices per home before “flagging” your accounts. No one knows for sure. It’s a black box, with hours of YouTube videos dissecting supposed “winning” strategies to beat the robots.

Robots?

The grey market descend on SNKRS with technology: sometimes individuals and other times “cook group” teams utilizing bots and server proxies essentially place hundreds or tens of thousands of automated orders, almost instantly. And the tech warfare is justified: if the flippers place orders on the right shoes, each pair “cooked” could net hundreds or sometimes thousands of dollars profit.

While Nike purportedly goes to great lengths to thwart the flipper/cooking efforts, casual sneaker collectors are in broad agreement that Nike is failing miserably - or allege Nike is not even trying, because Nike quietly seeks the resulting hype. (Sounding familiar?)

Here’s a few pics of the SNKRS app environment:






And on SNKRS release mornings, having furiously rushed to submit an order (or three), hopefuls then wait several excruciating minutes for SNKRS to possibly return this, the hallowed “got’em” page:




Notice the built-in “share” button at bottom, so that the lucky few who cop a pair can seamlessly broadcast their good fortune to the community at large through Twitter, Facebook, etc., at one click.

But instead of the “got’em” notice, normal collectors mostly receive instead the expected “out of stock” message. They’re then left to wrestle their conscience over buying from the grey market.

(The sneaker grey market’s incredible sophistication relative to the watch grey market is a subject for another time: suffices just to point out the multiple sneaker resale platforms and apps that make Chrono24 look prehistoric.)

Here’s what a dedicated sneakerhead’s closet/shoe room may look like:



But here’s what a sneaker flipper’s driveway may look like after fedex delivers a successful “cook” of a single online sneaker release:



Meanwhile, at the few brick-and-mortar shoe stores lucky enough to get pairs of these hot releases, another interesting ecosystem has evolved.

Stores use many, creative, ways of attempting to fairly allocate these sneaker releases. One common approach are raffles. The best (to me) of these raffles require hopeful purchasers to donate $[x] to a designated charity for a single entry in a drawing for a chance to purchase a single pair. (My local sneaker/skate shop during Q4 2020 raised >$100,000 for the local food bank.)



Other approaches by brick and mortar stores involve trivia, scavenger-type hunts, or other challenges. In the best cases, these types of gamesmanship approaches are structured to reward collectors and dissuade flippers. For example, one local skateboard shop in possession of a particularly hot model of Nike-for-skateboarders required entrants to submit a video of themselves completing a particularly difficult skateboard trick. Another skate shop posted a photo of an otherwise obscure park bench, recognizable only to skaters as being near a well known skate location, and then pulled up to the skate spot with a van and sold shoes to the first people to arrive via skateboard. They were sold out in minutes, after a swarm of skaters descended.

Still in more basic efforts to deter flippers, the better stores will also only sell pairs the size of the purchaser, or require that buyers wear the shoes out of the store (instantly killing any “dead stock” premium on the pair).

It’s not all so rosy colored, though. Many less scrupulous shops “back door” pairs (if not all their pairs) to flippers. Meanwhile, online retailers do far too little to combat bots and mass purchase techniques used by the grey market; at best, online retailers are engaged in a losing technology arms race with the entire flipper tech industry. And fake sneakers are a particularly vile problem in the sneaker world, because the fakes are often made in the same factory as the “real” versions - raising the issue to an almost philosophical thought experiment regarding the meaning of “real” vs “fake” in the sneaker context.

In all, I suspect I’ve relayed a bare minimum for you to extrapolate how the rest of this sneaker collector story goes. Everyone hates Nike’s SNKRS app, but can’t help but be there at 9AM EST smashing the “purchase” button to potentially have a chance to purchase the shoes at retail. Brick and mortar attempts to purportedly weed out flippers both alienate collectors while also - judging by the health of the grey market - seem to not work (or be genuine attempts in the first place).

I outline all of the above because I often wonder about a parallel watch universe run by sneakerheads. In that universe, Rolex would have an app that every two weeks dropped an unspecified allotment of Pepsi GMTs, using a mysterious algorithm that - it turns out - disproportionately rewards the most technologically sophisticated grey market flipper “cook groups.” Also in that alternate universe, Omega Boutiques would make their cal.321B order lists by requiring buyers to donate to the food bank for a raffle ticket, but then also to require buyers to on the spot correctly answer obscure trivia about 105.003 dial configurations as a precondition to taking delivery.

What do you all think? If we were brainstorming better ways of orchestrating the hottest new watch releases, what would it be?

One arguable takeaway from my experiences in the sneaker world: things could be much more creative in the watch world, but for every new solution there will be two new problems.

 

that's an interesting topic and thesis.

considering that more and more watch manufacturers and media outlets are creating LEs with small q'ties, which at the same time are exclusively sold online, I'd assume we'd also see the rise of bid robots respectively a continued flow of back door deals.

On the surface it may look more 'democratic' as random buyers would get a chance of owning their dream watch, but realistically speaking it's just a matter of (short) time until we'd find ourselves again in the same situation that we're facing now. Meaning a big gap between supply and demand combined with plenty of cheap money around and people willing to pay $$$$$$ just to have the latest model

 

eBay’s new “authentication” program applies to only two categories of items: watches, and sneakers

for this and other underlying similarities, I do think the sneaker world can inform (or warn) of certain possible futures for watches. And vice versa.

For example, OF has several recent posts regarding problems with eBay’s authentication program; some of the more academic sneaker collectors I follow have long been critiquing the eBay program for the same theoretical reasons also critiqued around here. With one of those collectors I shared some threads from OF, which the (marginally famous) collector then used as examples to educate their followers about the downsides and weaknesses of the eBay program as applies to sneakers.

that said, there are also many differences between industries that make comparisons imperfect or sometimes just misplaced.

 

The random drop date like in sneakers would give everyone a fair chance of getting the new watch instead of years of waiting lists. But this just opens it up to more and more sophisticated flippers with the technology and manpower to hoover them all up. The average joe who just wants one watch will probably be worse off. At least with a waitlist you know one day you can get the watch at retail.

 

for all their innovative ways of allocating product and (trying to) get flippers out of the market, it sounds like they are equally good at playing the 'I want what I can't get' game.

 

You mean people actually are seen in public wearing such strange looking footwear?!

 

Is there a culture in the world of trainers where all LEs go up in price simply because they are limited or do they have to be ultra desirable too? There are plenty of limited edition watches that don’t rise in price, perhaps because they are not desirable or the ‘wrong brand or model’ Maybe the comparative difference in price for a LE omega watch, quite a few thousand £/$/€/¥ vs a few hundred means fewer people are able to consider a watch purchase and those that can are more cautious about which ones they buy where as it makes sense to throw a few hundred at a pair of trainers that may bring super high returns compared to the initial outlay.

 

As sneakers age, the urethane part of the sneaker will hydrolyze.
If the sole of precious collection comes off, I won't be able to sleep because of the shock!

 

Tropical Trainers

 

Dude: what’s it like to be inside your head?

 

I would say they’re far better and that watch companies actually began modeling themselves after the sneakerverse, but that’s just anecdotal

what is objective: Nike releases between 2-20 of these potentially hot shoes each week, all year - so the sneaker industry as a whole is unquestionably far more prolific ...

being so prolific, there is a wide range of shopping to do

that said, ask the average joe what a $30,000 watch looks like and not one will describe a cartoon character on the dial

Noting how comparatively prolific the sneaker world is, otherwise your familiarity with the watch world is a near perfect proxy for how this goes in the sneaker world. There are very few brands with the cultural/market positioning to have a lot of big hits each year, and then there’s everyone else hoping to get a model on the radar now and then.

Also just the same: some new models are predictably crazy hot (eg, MSRP of $120 with instant resale in the thousands), others predictably fall flat (eg, they don’t sell out instantly online, or the trade at just a few bucks over MSRP), while still others buck all expectations in either directions (eg, hyped release falls flat, or a sleeper release becomes sneaker of the year).

 

I didn’t get into the vintage sneaker world on this post. But there are many interesting similarities and differences between that and the vintage watch world.

No doubt one big difference is the relative stability of materials

to be fair, their average cost of collectible is also far less...

 

???
View attachment 1151988

 

You really want to know? Hard pass for me...

 

EDC world is just as crazy.

Just do some research on a Spyderco Sprint runs in a certain steel and handle colour. 600 knives sell out in seconds. On EBay for several hundred within hours.

Lynch prybar. Near impossible to get one of these guys. ( took me a few years )


$200-500 Flashlights even harder to get.

Flippers are in every game, even games you didn’t know about.

 

And yet here you are.

In my thread.

Commenting.

Derogatorily.

 

In thinking about it, perhaps the best and most effective lessons can be learned at the level of the AD/OB.

Assuming good intentions of the owners and salespersons at AD/OBs, the far more egalitarian approach to sneaker sales could be implemented for hyped watch releases.

But perhaps there’s something about the watch buying community that’s different. For example, many times on OF I see collectors complaining about an AD/OBs attempts to vet potential buyers as being individual enthusiasts vs flippers. Perhaps those complaining only think the attempts are hamfisted, or insincere. But at other times it seems some watch folks are genuinely irritated that there is a “hot” product in the first place, with salespersons having the audacity to do anything but take their money. Witness for example one of our own OF member’s entertaining but at times puzzling effort basically collect instances of Rolex salespersons asking to meet their buyer in person, as though it’s widely agreed that’s a bad thing. (Meanwhile there are an equal number of threads complaining about salespersons back-dooring to flippers; maybe salespersons face a lose-lose decision in the eyes of buyers.)

In the sneaker community, collectors appear maybe more willing to accept that certain shoes are in fact desirable precisely because they are limited in numbers - and so welcome and praise any distributors’ efforts to weed out flippers.

There are some sneaker folks who might say, e.g., ‘Nike should just make more of these shoes,’ but very few who would go on to also say that brick-and-morter business owners playing the hand Nike dealt them should do anything but try to weed out flippers with whatever acrobatics are at their disposal.

 

No sense of humour today?

If you truly love a thread, set it free...if it comes back to you, it was yours. If it didn't, it never was...

 

The whole flipper thing weeding out is part forum/internet myth in the Omega scheme of things.

I have bought several watches ie: both ST LEs and a modern Speedmaster, Omega doesn’t know if I still have them but would still take my name for a Snoopy if I wanted one.
How are they weeding out a flipper if I was one...
To them I’m a VIP

I live 3500km from a boutique and never set a foot in one in Australia.

Just because people type stuff doesn’t always mean it true.........

 

@Archer are you saying I’m permitted to read into your comments even a ray a warmth?




I don’t want to speak too soon (leaving that there for you to pick up), but dare I say we’re finally entering Act III: