This week brings the release of the much-anticipated Yeezy 700 Mauve. After back-to-back restocks last month, the Yeezy 700 Mauve is the first new colorway to come out of Calabasas since the 350 Butter dropped last summer. And it comes at an interesting point in history, both for the adidas Yeezy line and for Kanye’s personal brand.
For starters, this is the first new release since Kanye began making good on his promise to democratize Yeezy access via restocks and increased supply. The new Yeezys-For-Everyone policy sent a chill through the secondary market, as resellers confronted the reality that their Yeezys could be devalued at any moment. The Yeezy 700 Mauve is only the second Yeezy 700 colorway ever made; the first, the Yeezy 700 Wave Runner, has already experienced two restocks this year alone, and its resale value has depreciated significantly as a result. Resellers and collectors looking to cop and stash the Yeezy 700 Mauve colorway may take a look at its 700 sister shoe and think twice.
The Yeezy 700 Mauve is also the first Yeezy to hit the market since Kanye’s full embrace of Trumpian trolling and MAGA provocation. Yeezus has always been a lightning rod. But given his full-scale embrace of our current president, the rapper has never been more polarizing. Given all this turbulence, we’ve been eager to see how the Mauve would perform on the secondary market.
Thus far, early sales data for the Yeezy 700 Mauve has shown price behavior that is fairly typical. Last week, individual pairs of the new colorway were selling for well over $600. But over the last 10 days, average prices have declined significantly. Now, on the eve of its release, Yeezy 700 Mauve prices have settled to an average of just $400 per pair. And we still haven’t arrived at the official release, after which prices are almost guaranteed to fall even further.
The pre-release price performance of the Yeezy 700 Mauve is consistent with that of the previous 3 Yeezy releases. The following chart shows how prices for the Super Moon, Blush, Butter, and Mauve colorways shifted over their first one thousand sales. In this chart, rather than organize the data by date, we show how prices changed relative to supply: that is, how did prices change from the 1st StockX sale to the 1000th StockX sale:
Compared to other recent Yeezy colorways at equivalent points in their supply cycle, the Yeezy 700 Mauve is clearly underperforming. As of today, we’ve had just over 400 sales of the Mauve colorway. And after 400 sales, the average price premium is down to just above 30% per pair. By comparison, the Blush was at 155% at its 400th sale, the Butter was at 66%, and the Super Moon was at 40%. And if the Mauve follows the same trend as the other four, we can expect margins to decline even further.
When considering the Mauve and Butter colorways – the two most recent Yeezy releases – it is interesting to observe how consistent their premiums are relative to the earliest sales of the Blush and Super Moon. In their first 100 sales, the Blush and Super Moon Yeezys had price premiums as high as 250%, and by their 300th sale, average premiums plummeted to well below 100%. By contrast, for the first 100 sales of the Mauve and Butter colorways, average premiums never rose above 100%. Unlike the earlier Blush and Super Moon releases, we never saw especially extravagant profit margins – even for the earliest sales.
In a previous article, we argued that Yeezy buyer expectations are changing: early buyers of the Blush and Super Moon believed that prices would remain high, and were thus willing to pay a premium early on. But more recently, with the Butter and Mauve releases, buyer expectations have shifted. Unlike previous eras, Butter and Mauve buyers never expected premiums to be anything but average, so they were never willing to shell out big bucks on early pairs.
We are clearly in a new era for Yeezy resale, with price premiums that remain consistently low, even in the traditionally volatile pre-release phase. What caused this change remains unclear. Is it the constant drumbeat of restocks, which threatens the long-term value of Yeezys across the board? Or is it Kanye’s personal antics, which have polarized if not alienated large swathes of his previously-loyal fanbase. Whatever the cause, a new normal has clearly arrived.
