When I first saw this the other day I thought it was a joke. IMO @brendandunne is like the master at tongue-in-cheek commentary (see @fullsizerunshow ) so I kinda thought he was just messin around…
But according to my source (AT the source) this is all true. Apparently high-heat items sold out immediately and the site subsequently crashed. Not cool.
This all went down on ‘the van’ - basically Nike’s employees-only clearance site (named after ‘the van’ that the founder used to sell shoes out of). In order to celebrate the holidays, the Van put out an event called ‘Van-mas’ (X-mas) from Dec 3 - Dec 17. Typically, high heat items - ie: collab shoes @off____white@fearofgod@supremenewyork@undefeatedinc - drop on day 2 and this was no exception. Everything dropped on the 4th and sold out immediately. Like...immediately. within 5 seconds. From what I understand - the Van is dealing in quantities of shoes in like 1-100 pairs max. Not thousands of pairs like on the public site. So selling out of 50 pairs probably goes pretty quick. Nike cybersecurity issued a statement that the Van would be shut down until they could figure out what was going on…and from what I understand - they even used the word ‘bot’ in the email (which they have never done)
NOW THIS part IS ALL SPECULATION - my dude gave an example that if approximately 40 pairs of Off-White Chicago 1’s were offered on the internal site at $80/pair…if one person running a bot scooped them all up in 5 seconds... I’m really not familiar with botting and multiple identities ESPECIALLY for an INTERNAL EMPLOYEES-ONLY checkout - but if this dude gets away with it and sells all 40 pairs at the going rate ($4k/pair) - that's roughly $150k in profit. In a matter of seconds. Assuming dude doesn't get caught - worth a shot? I just don't see how dude wouldn't get caught...I mean...he's an employee, right?
It sounds to me like all of this ‘false scarcity’ Nike has been rolling with in an attempt to sell ‘cool’ is backfiring. In all reality - this sounds like they’ve created a monster that is now beyond their control.