…and other witty ways of saying you didn’t cop nuthin’ this past weekend. Or did you?
True story: One of our volunteers bought a pair of Shattered Backboards last week off ISS for six hundred bones. Today he came by wearing them, but with a tear in his eye. He makes $11 an hour as an intern at a big company . . . he’ll have to work an extra twelve-and-half hours to make up the $135 he could’ve saved if he had just waited ’til Sunday to cop. In his defense, pre-sales sold for as much as $1135 on eBay, with 19 pairs selling for more than the $600 he paid. Also, the leather is pretty nice.
Moral of the story: We don’t do predictive analytics. But we do do really f*ckin’ good post-script diagnostics. Enjoy.
Key Insights:
- By now everyone knows the story here: Shattered Backboards coming down; Yeezy Lows going up. With shoes like the Jordan 1 DSM and Yeezy Boost 750 serving as release predecessors, the directions are not unexpected.
- Note this data is only through Sunday June 29th…our guess is both have continued to move in that direction, with SBB now less than $465, and Boost 350s now greater than $904
For a closer look at how every eBay sale shook out, try this scatter-plot on for size:
Key Insights:
- Notice the high pre-release volatility for the SBBs. People really had no idea where these were going to land. Compare that to the relative stability of Yeezy pre-release pricing
- Notice the density of the Yeezys compared to the SBBs: 663 total sales compared to only 536 Backboards.
As prices continue to rise (or decline), one of the most common issues is whether resellers are asking too much. This question manifests in many ways, and we have taken many different routes to provide relevant perspective. Last year we conducted a deep-dive analysis and found that “eBay Prices are a Lot Better Than You Think“; the high-level rationale being that listing prices are higher than sales prices. On average then, resellers are almost always asking more than market. But as soon as someone agrees to pay it, that becomes market. And so the next guy asks more. And the cycle continues. That’s how prices increase.
For the Yeezy Boost Low we can see this starting to happen already:
Key Insights:
- Resellers asking $73 over market might feel high, but it’s only an 8% premium
- In the week leading up to release, resellers knew market was going to $900 and were asking almost that, but buyers weren’t biting. Average sales price during that week was only $762 – 15% less than asking prices.
- But as soon as launch hit, every Tom, Dick and Hypebeast needed their Yeezy, and prices started to climb
- Resellers continued to raise asking price about 6% a day, and will likely continue to do so for at least a little while. The question we all want to know, of course, is when will it stop?
What do you think? Did these releases perform as expected?
