Some of us have been in the sneaker space for a long time. I am grateful for the days of sitting outside of shopping malls with like-minded sneakerheads as we waited for the sun to come up and Foot Locker to open. Here in Arizona, it was always Metrocenter. If I couldn’t snag the new Jordans at Foot Locker, I would take the escalator up to Champs. But some mornings, your size sold out before you got to any of the registers. And if they did, you had to drive home to crack open the Yellow Pages (some of you might have to google that one) and call other stores to find out what sizes they had in stock. If Chris-Town Mall had the size, I jumped in the ’84 Honda CRX and drove across the valley to pick em up.
Something crazy happened a few years back. The market went through the roof and EVERYONE wanted to be a sneakerhead. I can’t put my finger on the pair, or the month that started the explosion in the sneaker space, but around the time that a lot of us were getting stimulus checks from the government, EVERYTHING was selling out and resellers were poppin up EVERYWHERE. I was entering every single draw on SNKRS. If you were there, I’m sure you remember taking all those Ls on the draws. Bots were a bigger problem than ever. Even the GR pairs were tough to get. But if you hit, it was too easy on the resale side. Drive to your local shop, put down your pair and get paid. We all waited for the panda Dunk restock. Nike was selling panda dunks for $100. Every pair you could get your hands on were worth $200 at the resale shop and the shop would flip em for $300. Sometimes more. But that’s all old news.
What about now? It’s easy to say that sneakers are dead. And there are a lot of influencers in this community that are saying it. But are they? Nike is down. Down Bad. Down about 20% as I type this. When the sneaker market was red hot, Nike knew about those $300 panda dunks. Nike raised their prices. Now the market is down, but the prices aren’t. The Vomero and the Blazer have had big years lately. But not big enough. Nike’s bread and butter are shoes like the Air Force 1, Monarch, the P-6000 and the Pegasus. It’s not a pair of Travis Scotts that sell 150K units. It’s not the Nike Alphafly 3 with its retail price of $285 that caters to a very small niche of consumers. Nike is bleeding a bit. Everything is expensive nowadays. And trends change. Nike needs a Band-Aid…
This week, Nike names Elliott Hill as their new CEO. He becomes John Donahoe’s successor and Nike’s stock skyrockets. Hill might not mean much to most people reading this, but his return to Nike is not unimportant. He was there in 1988. He was there for “Just Do It” and he was there for Jordan Brand. He then departed from Nike for a short time. He has now returned and Nike is lucky to have him back.
Today the sneaker community faces a bit of a catch 22. We can get almost any sneaker we want with the occasional L on limited stock numbers. But if it’s not hype, some heads won’t want it. There hasn’t been much to be excited about lately. Who at Jordan brand decided that the community needs all those Ochre colorways? We did get a Jordan 17 (with the briefcase) but it was a very limited release. And it was the lightning colorway instead of “college blue”. And it was $300. We have gotten a few bangers. The Futura x Dunk is incredible, the Jordan 4 Reimagined didn’t work for everyone but it did for me, and I really like the Jumpman Jack from Travis Scott. But if these are at the top of the list for 2024, what are we going to get in 2025?
The answer is…everything. This may be due in part to Elliott Hill. Everything from re-issued grails to more classic colorways than we have seen in a long time. 2025 is going to be a problem for a lot of bank accounts. It started with the Wu-Tang Dunk rumor. The news struck a nerve on social media. It’s a shoe no one has, but now it’s controversial. If they re-release it, do the original 36 pairs from 1999 decrease in price? Probably not. But there is controversy because it’s a grail. And Nike is going to (possibly) re-release them. Then we heard about the Undefeated Jordan 4. This is a shoe from 2018 with sales in the $30K range. 2025 will see two version of the shoe with two different heel logos, and I’m here for it. I’m not a huge Jordan 4 fan, but I’ll put in on these for sure. Arizona has an Undefeated chapter store. Do I get to camp out and wait in line at sunrise….man I hope so!
The general releases for next year will be crazy. Black Cat 4s, Black Metallic Jordan 5 reimagined (my favorite shoe of all time), Union LA x Jordan 1 OG and Jordan 1 High ’85 Bread…all before Valentines Day. Later in the year we get two different colors of the Jordan 4 SB, Melo Jordan 12s, Grape 5s, and White Cement 4s. In May, we get a very unexpected silhouette. The Jordan 10 in the desirable “Steel” colorway.
In Spring, we will see the Flu Game 12s and Cool Grey 9s. Travis Scott x 1 Low in Velvet Brown, Dark Pony/Pink AND Sail/Shy Pink. During summer, we’ll get the Aqua 8s and Ferrari 14s! Fall will see the Jordan 1 “Shattered Backboards”. The Travis Scott x Fragment x Jordan 1 Low, Jordan 10 Shadow, Jordan 8 Bugs Bunny, and the Jordan 12 Taxi. The internet seems confident that we will also get the Off-White x Jordan 1 Canary, but I believe that one when we get conformation from Nike.
Let that spring line up sink in for a second. The Flu Game 12 is the most iconic 12 because of Game 5 in 1997. MJ plays 44 minutes and scores 38 including the game winning 3 pointer, with 25 seconds left. MJ was staggering from exhaustion and illness. And the shattered backboard. This colorway was given to us back in 2015 and became a grail in a lot of collections. The shattered backboard storytelling takes us back to spring of ’85. MJ was drafted in ’84 and wins Rookie of the Year. Nike sponsored a basketball game to be played in Trieste, Italy. MJ plays for Trieste whose uniform is orange and black. MJ scored 30 in the game but the moment that fans will always remember is Jordan’s dunk that broke and shattered the backboard. The moment created the legend of the “shattered backboard” colorway. MJ wore a pair of Jordan 1s in the exhibition in the Chicago colorway. The pair from that game would go on to sell at auction for $615K. It’s the most expensive Jordan ever sold at auction. And the pair has a shard of the backboard stuck in the sole of the shoe to this day. Amazing. The quality on the 2015 pair has become the benchmark for all pairs after. I have never owned a pair, but the quality of materials is second to none. Fingers crossed that Nike will give us the same buttery leather on next years retro.
All of these grails and OG colorways will certainly give Nike a boost. We know the demand for a few of these drops will be through the roof. We need the resellers. Sneaker shops are like record shops or comic shops. We get to talk about the shoes we love (and don’t love) with like-minded people. It’s a great experience. These shops popped up on every corner during the pandemic because it was too easy. Everyone was chasing Nikes. I put in for EVERY release on SNKRS during the pandemic. Any pair I hit was a quick $50 or $100 bill in my pocket with no effort at all. It was a win / win. We made money, resellers made money, Nike made money. Now that the market has dipped, resellers are getting out of the game. But when next years’ pairs get here, we know we can’t cop them all. Who is there to save the day? Not eBay. Not Stock X. It’s resellers. That’s how we get those pairs we missed. Next year, I hope we can find the balance of pairs we want to buy with the availability we have now. But you can’t have both. It’s hard to believe how many pairs I have on my want list for 2025. How many are on your want list? Make sure every pair you get, you wear em!