Just like the vibrating version of the fast hand, the fast version of the vibrato, the poison and Nice are more and more like competitors.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “chasing books” (ID: luanbooks) , author | Yang Baishun.
After the “NBA” incident broke out, CCTV and Tencent Sports announced that they would stop broadcasting NBA events. Enterprises that have cooperated with the NBA have issued a statement to suspend cooperation. In the sneaker circle, poison, nice and other sneaker trading platforms have urgently removed NBA-related goods, and one paragraph began to spread: “There are 50 brothers who have joined the NBA joint name, and now they are on the platform.”
The business of some shoe and shoe dealers is inevitably affected, but it is said that this incident will make the domestic shoe market completely “cool”, I am afraid it is too arbitrary. Regardless of the final development of the event itself (Tencent Sports has resumed live video of some NBA games yesterday), NBA joint shoes account for only a small part of the entire shoe market, and most of them are non-limited shoes. The heat of these shoes is The “explosive” sneakers with high speculation prices have a world of difference. Everyone’s enthusiasm for hot sneakers is hard to die.
Nice wants to be poison, but poison wants to be Nice
In early September, Levi’s official public number released information on the sale of Nike’s joint sneakers. Two pairs of Air Force One Air Force 1, high-help 1299 yuan, low-help 1199 yuan, users need to register the lottery on Levi’s official website. The winner is eligible for purchase. However, at 9 am on September 6th, when the lottery registration began, everyone found that Levi’s official website collapsed – all 403Forbidden, no one can see the registration entrance.
It’s not surprising that there are too many people who want these two pairs of shoes. There are various rumors about the volume of goods in the shoe circle. Some people say that only 200 pairs are issued in China. Exceeding the limit means the super high resale price of the secondary market. On the day of the shoe trading app, the price of Levi’s joint name has been almost 20,000, who will let the 1500% profit margin? When a large number of users flocked to the shoes, the Nike official and Alipay were all recorded in a short period of time, and Levi’s was not spared.
However, 403 did not disappear with time, until the afternoon of the same day, most users still could not register. In the sneaker group, everyone’s emotions turned into fears, and they began to worry that they would not be able to get on the runway if they had passed the registration time (shoe ring black words: accompanying running = pumping shoes, running on the runway = participating in registration). Occasionally, someone in the group said that the registration was successful, and they would be asked “skills”. Some people even sell the “Levi’s Generation Registration” service on the idle fish, registering 10 yuan once..
In a snoring of Levi’s, there are group comments:
He estimates that the shoe loop is underestimated.
Why are the shoes hot?
On the two days after the joint registration of Levi’s, CCTV2 “Economic Half-hour” broadcasted the topic of “Fringing Shoes and Lakes”, calling for “shoes not to be fired and risky”.
Today, the sneaker market has changed from a niche culture to a hot economic phenomenon that has attracted the attention of the whole people. The story of “95 years of relying on shoes to enter the million” has been written countless times by major public accounts. The sneaker trading platform continued to be hot. In the past year, the amount of drug apps reached 15.3 billion, and the number of monthly users was nearly 8 million. Numerous sneakers “rushing groups” emerged, and the group of friends who took the opportunity to enter the market was a few hundred pairs.
“There are no more than 10 million younger brothers who retreat in a month. This is the core group.”
A group of half-tweet speeches map out the madness of capital within the circle.
Shoes are on fire, but the secondary market for sneakers is not a new product. When the brand chooses to sell the shoes through the “limited” method, they need to queue and draw lots.Buying, when the supply is in short supply, the people who can’t get the price increase, and the price increase in the hands of the goods, forming a secondary market for shoe trading.
Also let some products maintain a resale price higher than the original price, which has always been the usual strategy of sports brands such as Nike and Adidas. While speculation does not allow brands to make a direct profit, its potential for brand value can create huge benefits for Nike and Adi. The popularity of a pair of shoes depends on the amount of goods, media exposure, whether it is a joint name, whether there is a star to bring goods, etc., and these are all brands can control. When the Yeezy 350 white zebra color was first released, there were several hundred pairs in China, and the selling price was 1899 yuan. When the person who qualified for the purchase went out of the store, someone waited for the price of more than 10,000 yuan. At that time, who could have expected, after the large replenishment of Adidas, the market price of white zebra is now stable at 3000+. Through this limited amount of sizzling, and then a large number of shops with the same series of products, Yeejy’s sales this year is expected to exceed $1.3 billion.
Before the advent of the “all-person trafficker” era, if you want to make money by selling shoes, you have a little channel. After the large Taobao shop and the big sellers purchase goods from foreign sneakers and other channels, they distribute them to the downstream small shoe sellers. The small shoe sellers sell the goods to customers through free fish and micro-business.
The offline store is also one of the important channels. When the AJ1 “barb” was released this year, it was rumored that Beijing NikeLab stores deducted more than 200 pairs of shoes and secretly pulled the shoes to the underground parking lot and sold them to a trafficker. At that time, the market price of barbs was about 7,000 yuan (now 15,000 yuan), and the profit of 200 pairs of shoes was more than 1 million. After the news was exposed, public opinion was furious.
Travis Scott x Air Jordan 1 “Barb”
But actually, this kind of operation was the secret of the sneaker resale. In Beijing, Shanghai and other places, you can always hear a few “big brothers” who can get the shoes. The key to sweeping the goods is the close relationship with the store. If the relationship is good, you will be able to get the inventory information of the store in the first time. The two sides will cooperate in the sale, and the shoes can be sent to their own hands.
In exchange, the trafficker should also help the store to ease the inventory pressure of non-explosive shoes. At the same time, the appropriate fare increase to the shoes to the dealer can also bring more cash flow to the store. Both sides can benefit from it. When the shoes are still a small circle, the black-box operation between the shoe store and the store is just a regular mode.
The fact that the accelerator is pressed for the outbreak of the whole country’s shoes is the result of variety and stars.Enter the era of “all traffickers”.
The two major trading platforms in China are poisonous and nice, but they are a bit “interchangeable body”. Nice wants to surpass the poison and become the boss of the sneaker trade; the poison wants to be the former nice – to be a “trend community of young people.”
It’s like a vibrating version of the fast hand, a fast-hand version of the vibrato, and the poison and Nice are more and more like competitors.
Poison and nice: past and present
“Buy shoes like stocks,” Josh Luber said in 2015. Later, he founded StockX, a US-style shoe trading platform commonly known as “Green Fork”, which attracted Eminem and other star investors during the 17-year A round of financing. In 18 years, he completed a $40 million Series B financing in the capital winter and became a new independent. Horned beast.
The domestic platforms are also developing rapidly. Using the sneakers to identify the core users to complete the accumulation of the domestic shoe trade “big boss” poison App, after the valuation of more than 1 billion US dollars, but want to transform into a male living community, more intuitively, the male version of the small red book.
Swipe the recommended stream of the drug home page, you can see the contents of perfumes, watches, digital, cars and even cute pets – the poison is covering as many male consumer categories as possible; at the same time, the poison is also improving the short video content. As a percentage, you can even easily brush out the sound video of Li Zikai on the homepage. From this series of operations, it can be seen that the poison is eager to make a more generalized community.
However, the effect of these efforts is not significant. For most users, no matter how busy the poisonous community is, they won’t stop because it’s not the purpose of their poison. Just like you don’t want to open Taobao to watch news, a scaled and extremely vertical trading platform, it is difficult to fundamentally change the user’s usage habits. The foundation of the community is people, not the content and mechanism of the first construction; as long as the existence of poison as a “shoes trading platform” is not reversed, the community will always be an edge function.
On the other hand, the sneaker trading platform nice, which completed the tens of millions of dollars in the D round of financing in June this year, is abandoning the existing community attributes and is advancing on the road of speculating shoes. Nice was founded in 2013. In the early days, it was a picture socialization. In 2014, it completed three rounds of financing of more than 60 million US dollars. After the sneakers’ secondary market was hot, it resolutely transformed, and the sneaker resale platform went online for 5 months, and the monthly GMV exceeded 100 million.
Compared with poison, nice’s role is more radical, making many outstanding contributions to the popularity of “soys shoes.” For example, the flash purchase and hosting services that nice promoted directly used the stock trading model to sneaker resale. I used to buy a pair of shoes on the platform. After ordering, I need to wait for the seller to ship to the platform. After the platform is certified, I will ship it to the buyer. The cycle is about one week. In the flash-hosting mode, shoes are pre-registered in the platform warehouse.Buyers can buy the shoes through the flash, and they can continue to store the shoes on the platform, waiting for the price to sell directly. A pair of shoes can be sold quickly by buying and selling without having to go to the user. This function directly caused the virtualization of the spot trading of shoes – everyone is not a shoe at all, but a virtual voucher, and the speed of capital circulation has been fundamentally improved.
Open the recommendation flow of nice, you can’t see a few users to take photos, but the analysis of the market: how to do the bear market, this month’s financial recommendation, how to improperly pickle… the shoe circle big V “fly brother” (also settled in nice “Shoes Analyst” has commented: “nice has made innovative reforms and first upgraded itself to a shoe exchange, and poison is still doing ideological work in this area.”
Poison may not do ideological work at all. First, the biggest challenge facing the poison is not to continue to deepen the sneaker market, but how to break through the ceiling of the sneaker field and acquire a larger number of user groups. Second, as the largest sneaker trading platform in the country, after deep contact with relevant state agencies. Poison can only hold high the banner of “shoes don’t fry”. In contrast, nice must quickly expand its share of the sneaker market, face more powerful sizing of scale and service, follow the upsurge of speculative shoes, and be the promoter of the digitalization of sneaker transactions. In addition, nice has been exposed to events that users can’t withdraw, and it is also very doubtful that Nice is in urgent need of replenishing cash flow through a large number of sneaker transactions.
Poisoning the community, nice shoes, can also see some clues from the two founders.
Poison CEO Yang Bing is also one of the founders of Tiger Puff. In the early years, he and Cheng Hang worked together on the construction of the Tigers. Nowadays, the poisonous user group and the tiger’s flutter overlap but are very different. The value generated by a group of younger and more vocal people in the future is undoubtedly Yang Bing does not want to let go. However, the achievements of poison as a trading platform have become the biggest stumbling block to the transition community.
Compared with Yang Bing, Nice CEO’s CEO (Alex) is much more famous in the shoe circle. Zhou Shouzhong was interested in sneakers in order to buy shoes. At that time, he began to “sell and suck” – buy shoes from Ebay and sell them to domestic sneakers to earn extra money. It is said that he majored in software engineering at the university.It is for the future to do the sneaker website. When the tide brand and the sneaker consumption had a raging fire in the country, his timing finally came. Nice from the social transformation of the picture, and vigorously invested in the sneaker trade, Zhou Shou started the live broadcast as a CEO on Nice, and suddenly wanted to make himself a KOL. The theme of the live broadcast is “How to make money by investing in sneakers”. He teaches users how to be bullish, bearish and fast arbitrage during the live broadcast. During this period, he does not hide his swearing. He said that he is doing a shoe-making platform:
“Make money is a must, who tmd shoes do not make money? As long as you are shoes, you want to make money, today’s Chinese shoe culture is not so healthy, although we nice is a shoe platform, it is a shoe Platform, we sold so many AJs and coconuts, we believe that our platform is responsible, but I don’t think this is wrong.”
This speech has attracted a lot of controversy. The live recording screen has been forwarded and criticized by the various sneakers from the media. “CEOs are like this, nice can still be like this.” “The shoe circle is badly driven by such people.” . In the midst of a roar, Zhou’s head still exposed himself. Recently, he was seen in CCTV’s “Fish Shoes,” but this time he talked about how the platform can improve the risk control mechanism. Every time I “go personally”, there is a heart that wants to be red, such a week, presumably will run on the road of his shoe sales.
Suspicious of the week’s comment on the article criticizing nice
What are the opportunities?
In the hot shoe field, what opportunities do Internet companies have in addition to shoe trading? Talking about two ideas:
The first opportunity, or the community. The poison can’t get through. For new players, the male version of the little red book is an opportunity. There are many people who want to eat this cake, but like knowing the CHAO community, the idea of directly copying the little red book does not seem to work. How to do it? To seize these “Z generations” users, it is not enough to blindly cover popular categories. The key is to have a deep understanding of the cultural core of their pursuit, and to create a “player” identity with appropriate gameplay.
The example that I would like to mention here is “Custom Shoes” – in general, it is to change the color, material, and even painting and engraving to DIY the shoes. In the field of sneakers, the concept of custom can be traced back to the “co-branded” works of early brand officials and artists. For example, Nike invited graffiti and tattoo artist Mark Machado more than a decade ago.The classic shoe Air Force 1 was remodeled and launched the “MR.CARTOON” series. Later, Nike launched the Nike iD. All users can make “customized custom” for the classic shoes such as Air Max and Blazer. In the official website, the shoes are matched with the color and placed, and the shoes are officially produced and sent.
The sneaker players are not satisfied with this simple DIY – the folk sneakers have emerged as a result, creating highly personalized shoes for the players, which makes the custom culture fast in foreign sneakers. development of. Coupled with the celebrities such as stars and singers, the foreign shoe-making system has produced a more mature business model. Today, in North America and Europe, there are countless teams of shoes and sneakers. Los Angeles’s high-end custom team The Shoe Surgeon, a pair of shoes can sell dozens of times the price of the original shoes.
The Shoe Surgeon works
In the final analysis, the custom system satisfies the player’s pursuit of “uniqueness”. Wearing the AJ1 barb is very nb, but it is not nb when you go out and hit several barbs. Renovation of a pair of mass-produced sneakers into a single pair, painted in the school uniforms in the middle school era, probably out of the same original impulse. The domestic shoe-making system is in its infancy, and the service is basically provided by several custom-made teams with a high level of originality + a group of amateurs who can produce finished products according to the ready-made design. With the increase in the number of shoe fans and the evolution of the domestic shoe culture, the customer system must become one of the mainstream gameplay of the shoe circle. Connecting a good customer system to the users who will need it, becoming a platform for providing a customized service + a promoter of a custom culture may be one of the ideas for grasping the core group and generalizing the trend community.
HZP works of domestic custom team
Second opportunity, sneakers primary market. Poison and nice trading platforms belong to the secondary market, and the brand’s official original price is the primary market, such as the release of Nike’s official online store and offline stores, and the release of Levi’s official website at the beginning of this article. Nowadays, the secondary market platform is constantly emerging, and the primary market has been neglected to some extent. However, the primary market has more core users and more direct pain points: the official release is the lowest-priced and guaranteed channel, just hard to grab, not only limited, The sale method is also varied, and Nike’s sneakers are available in more than ten different sales models. There are a large number of unmet user needs here, and these needs will be continuous.
There is already a platform for users in the service level of the sneakers. The function in the app is very hard for the sneakers: the sale reminder, also known as the “monitoring”, crawls all kinds of sneakers to sell websites. When there is a new product, it will push the message to the user to respond to the “sudden sale” without advance notice; the smart generation will automatically help the user to participate in the official online lottery, and support multiple accounts to register at the same time, thereby increasing the chance of shoes.
SHOCK App primarily serves users of the sneaker primary market
The demand and play of the sneaker primary market, there is still a lot of imagination. More importantly, those who will continue to be active in the primary market are the core fans (compared to those who do not have to struggle to grab shoes, just see the purchase advertisement in the circle of friends and then go to the dealer to buy a few pairs of shoes) In terms of). Their pursuit and enthusiasm for the trend culture will become the spiritual core of this group and this generation. In these lovers, you can see the possibility of gathering into a younger, more trendy “Little Red Book” community.
Many people think that the bubble of fried shoes will soon burst. Maybe the speculative boom will not continue to rise, but the textThe impact of the transformation is long-lasting. Sneakers fanaticism is a microcosm of the unique context developed after 95s and 00s. The trend culture of its mapping is still in the enlightenment stage in China, and there is a very extensive space for education. From skateboarding, surfing, to hip hop, electric sound, to sneakers, blind boxes, no one knows what the next explosion point is.
But this is no longer important. What really matters is the commonality of the bottom layer of this generation reflected by these explosions – the pursuit of unique, independent. The collective memory precipitated by each explosion will continue to rush between this group and will not disappear easily. The platform of the trend is also good for the community. Only by understanding and hitting this underlying commonality, can there be the possibility of stopping this group of young people.