We love Sole Collector. Been around forever. So much more than you average sneaker site: the Forum, the Marketplace, the community – all great. We also like “Cop or Not”, the feature where sneakerheads vote up (or down) new releases based on whether they’d buy it. Each sneaker ends up with a “Cop” percentage (and a corresponding “Not” percentage, equaling 100%).
For example:
Not surprisingly, the Jordan 5 Doernbecher has the highest Cop Percentage (82%) of all September releases.
And it’s a safe bet that it will be the most expensive resold sneaker of September releases, as well – current eBay auctions are starting at over $1000. The question, then, is whether this relationship holds for all sneakers?
Hypothesis: The Cop Percentage is predictive of resell price for all new releases.
Data Set: KD IVs. We removed the hyper-strikes (Nerf, Weatherman and Galaxy) and collected three data points: 1) Sole Collector Cop Percentage, 2) Average DS Resale Price over the three months following release; and 3) Total Sales Volume over the three months following release.
| KD IV | Volume | Cop % | Price |
| Texas-Longhorns | 39 | 55.1 | 153 |
| Easter | 162 | 63.2 | 173 |
| Black-Away | 28 | 69.9 | 176 |
| N7-White-Home | 48 | 71.0 | 173 |
| Scoring-Title | 68 | 71.5 | 234 |
| Year-Of-The-Dragon-YOTD | 120 | 75.1 | 192 |
| Aunt-Pearl | 72 | 77.3 | 300 |
| USA-Olympic | 37 | 78.3 | 210 |
| Black-History-Month-BHM | 32 | 80.4 | 206 |
| Gold-Medal | 98 | 85.1 | 247 |
If there was a perfect correlation between Cop Percentage and Price then we would expect the highest Cop Percentage (Gold Medal, 85.1%) to also have the highest resell price. But here we can see that the Aunt Pearl has the highest resell price ($300). The Gold Medal, however, has the second highest resell price ($247) and it looks like most of the low priced pairs are near the top of the list, so maybe there is a correlation.
Volume, on the other hand, is all over the place – there is no discernible pattern – so we’ll discard that analysis.
For Price, let’s look at the numbers on a graph.
Again, it looks like there is an upward trend in Price – which would make sense because Cop Percentage is plotted in ascending order – but it might help if we show the “trendline” for Price. This is a statistical tool which shows the direction and rate at which a data set is trending. In this case, we’re looking to see if Price is increasing (upward slope) at roughly the same rate (angle) as the Cop Percentage line.
Sure enough, the Price Trendline looks pretty close to the Cop Percentage line. They are both sloped upward (increasing) with a similar slope – close enough for us to conclude that there is a correlation. The fact that Price has a greater slope than Cop Percentage simply means that Price increases at a greater rate than Cop Percentage.
For you statisticians out there, we ran a correlation test and the correlation coefficient (r) is .66, indicating a pretty strong correlation between Cop Percentage and Price.
Conclusion: Cop Percentage is predictive of resell price – at least for KD IVs. The higher the Cop Percentage, the greater we can expect the resell price to be.
Caveat: Ten sneakers is a pretty small sample size for any conclusive result, so we’ll be sure to run this analysis again with more sneakers.
What other sneakers should we test against it’s Cop Percentage?
