- Posts
- 3,998
- Likes
- 9,015
cvalue13
·I hadn't considered that someone breaking the embargo made things worse, but it makes sense.
Who exactly do you think is alleged to break the embargo?
Separately, the article’s underlying presumption is that hysteria-inducement wasn’t the point, despite going on to then describe being surprised by several elements of the release that could be explained simply by the opposite presumption (e.g., “gosh, what were they only releasing to a few stores, and what were thinking barely supplying the stores with units, they must not have thought about it!”).
To be fair, while reading this article and thinking about the above point, I remembered that even in the sneaker and hype apparel worlds, there are still hordes of buyers who seem to ignore the obvious - with each release taking to twitter to complain “why won’t Nike/Supreme just make enough sneakers/clothes for everyone who wants them - they’d make more money.”
Despite the CEO of Supreme, arguably the architect of modern hype releases, over a decade ago going on record to explain:
James Jebbia is Supreme (Interview Magazine, 2009)
“[Supreme’s] shoes and other products are collected as fanatically as art. Sometimes when a new item comes in, customers line up on the sidewalk for 24 hours, sleeping on the street to be among the lucky few who are able to buy it—there’s a big secondary market for Supreme stuff, in part because it is produced in only very small quantities, but also because Supreme has just two shops in the U.S. (one in New York and one in L.A.)….
“Jebbia: We’ve never really been supply-demand anyway. It’s not like when we’re making something, we make only six of them. But if we can sell 600, I make 400. We’ve always been like that—at least for the past seven or eight years… That’s why we never, ever classify our stuff as limited. Ever. In an ideal world for us, I look at it like the product sold out within two weeks. Ideally, we have it and it’s gone in two weeks and then it’s done.”
Yet years in, the same “they have to want to sell more units” cognitive dissonance.
The same cognitive dissonance is on display in the watch world with Rolex, evidence by a certain infamous Rolex-themed thread that after 3-4 years and thousands of posts still has people saying “Rolex would make make more money if it just made more watches, and it wouldn’t irritate its customers!”
So, if Nike, Supreme, Rolex and the like have been doing this sort of brand value prioritization by exclusivity of product, and still there exists swaths of people who can’t wrap their heads around it or believe it’s by design - I suppose that is part of the magic of the business strategy.
