Picture this:
Young boys with sneakers slung around their shoulders and pockets full of cash, huddle in hotel ballrooms and high school gyms, shouting and bartering as if they were on a trading room floor. This latest sports footwear craze, this teenage marketplace for high-end sneakers, has spread across the US. These teenage traders know their stuff; they recite resale values and spout debut dates for new lines.
Imagine this:
One of the 14-year-olds already has 81 pairs in his sneaker collection, costing $11,000 but worth probably $20,000 if he sold them all. But that’s a small corner of the market: basketball sneaker sales made up $4.5 billion of the total $21 billion athletic shoe business, according to Princeton Retail Analysis.
Top this:
At a Manhattan event, one young vendor turned away $98,000 in cash for his Nike Air Yeezy 2 “Red October” sneakers, designed by Kanye West and signed by the artist himself onstage at the Nassau Coliseum in February.
Excerpts from Article and Photo Source:
followingfeet 