(3/6) The secret to reselling.

My mom started bringing me to thrift stores when I was very young, but the first time I fell in love with the process was when I was 12 years old. That ‘Dre Day’ video with Dre and Snoop had just come out, and Snoop - the absolute PINNACLE of cool to me - was wearing a Ben Davis shirt.

Now, I had no idea what a ‘Ben Davis shirt’ was, but when I saw the EXACT same shirt that Snoop was wearing in a thrift store in Reno, Nevada for $3.50, I was hooked. I wore that shirt until the Ben Davis Gorilla had lost all of its color. I even found some pens to re-color it.

Fast forward a couple of years - I found almost all of the stuff I was ever interested in thrift stores and garage sales…rap music, skateboards, cards, comics, clothes, hats, whatever. One time, my mom and I stopped at a garage sale and I copped my first two fitteds (a SF Giants and a NY Mets) and a box full of rap tapes Onyx, Young MC, Digital Underground, Young M.C. for like $5 total. And at that time - NO ONE had fitteds. And these were fitteds BEFORE the MLB logo on the back. That’s how long ago this was (I’m thinking it was 1990). Funny to say, but that garage sale changed my life…all that stuff that I always wanted at such an accessible price point? I was hooked.

I want to say the first dope pair of shoes I remember finding at a thrift store was around the year 2000, when I found a near-new pair of Shox BB4’s at a Salvation Army in Santa Cruz for $7.99. They were about a size too small, but I had to make my feet suffer to show off my prowess.

I learned of the semi-thrift/semi-consignment stores, like Buffalo Exchange and Crossroads trading and went to every location every chance I got. I moved to New York a couple years later, and came up on some AF1 ‘Year of the Horse’ for a few bucks and then the hits just didn’t stop because I was persistent.

Of course, the Carhartt story - although not a garage sale or thrift shop - is my favorite…still semi-relatable because it involves an absolute steal. Where I managed to pull a bunch of pairs of a coveted Dunk SB for $20/pair a few days after release through (what I believe to be) a shipping error. I made several trips back to this store until he sold out, ending up with 20-30 pairs in total.

The Carhartt experience got my (now) wife on board because she saw that I could actually make money selling shoes even though I wasn’t gouging anyone - I was actually *hooking them up. So we’d make several weekly/monthly pilgrimages to the outer reaches of Long Island and Connecticut - hitting thrift after thrift in pretty well-known rich areas. And when we moved back west to California, we made mental maps of all of the Buffalo Exchanges and Crossroads from Sacramento to San Diego and hit each and every store any time we were within 50 miles. And that’s what I’d do for fun. Some people travel for food and museums and sightseeing - I’d go to thrift shops.

I found quite a few MASSIVE gems at a few of these shops, especially in the early 2010’s, including a pair of Paris Dunks and a few pairs of Jordan PE’s that collectively sold for more than $15k. I know that doesn’t sound like much, but at the time, I didn’t know ANYONE - not even the BIGGEST COLLECTORS - spending that kind of cash on shoes. It’s almost laughable now with how much growth has transpired in the past 5 years. But this is when I started taking ‘reselling’ like really seriously. When my buddy helped me create a logo. And it’s also when I started putting it on my tax returns and claiming it as income. It’s also about the time I started thinking about the grading algorithm that would become ‘shoemetrics.’

But those massive hits were few and far between.

I’d estimate that for every one of those gems, I’d found at least 250 semi-gems. And for every one of those semi-gems there’d be 250 nothings. And my definition of a semi-gem wasn’t like a $500 shoe. A semi-gem in my mind would be something that I thought I could sell for double or triple what I bought it for. Regardless of what it was. So if I found a $40 shoe for $18, that was a semi-gem because I could make an actual profit off of it. I made it a rule - I simply wouldn’t pick up anything that I (wouldn’t wear nor) didn’t believe I couldn’t sell for more than double whatever it was that I was coppin at. And the majority of these shoes that I’d pick up were selling for $18-37, so if I couldn’t sell them for $40-80, I wouldn’t bother. Sometimes I’d cop pairs for people I knew - people who were looking for specific shoes. But most would end up selling in the $120-150 range. So I was making even more than my double or triple rule. But the funny thing is…at that time…it was SUPER easy to find shoes for really cheap. You’d go into a Nike Outlet and they’d have a whole wall full of $29.99 Talaria’s or $39.99 Uptempo Maxes and I’d just have a goddam field day because I knew I could sell those for $100/pair all day. One time I copped like 20+ pairs of various ACG’s for $9.99/each. Just crazy deals.

I bought these SIZE 18 hyperdunk Elites (and KD IV creamsicles) hella cheap and just had to take some pics…

And I just did most of this for fun, really.

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