There is little mounted on Nike right now. Perhaps you have already found out or perhaps you are caught in the news, but just in case, we quickly put you in the situation: the son of the vice president of the slippers he's been caught reselling (in some cases limited edition) copies on a massive scale, using an organized network of people, various popular apps, and his mother's credit card in the process. Oh Show.
The resale of sneakers, a booming business
The famous American media Bloomberg has published an interesting article in which the modus operandi de Joe Herbert. This 19-year-old teenager, better known in networks as West Coast Joe and son of the vice president of Nike in the US, had a solid network of reselling shoes that, after a long time generating high income, has exploded in his face.
The letter also makes a fantastic reference to how this nonsense for sneakers began, whose germ could well be located in 1985, when Nike decided to launch the very famous Air Jordan 1. This model, in honor of basketball player Michael Jordan (and which would end up generating his own franchise within the firm), "sold faster than it could be manufactured." Retailers came into play and sold the few units they could get for something more expensive, taking advantage of people's craving. The shoe brand was carefully observing this market reaction and for the Air Jordan 2 it became more exquisite: it further limited its distribution and raised the official cost. Then eBay came along and individuals got into the "business" too. The rest, as you can imagine, is already history of the sneaker world.
Today the most special and coveted editions come out for very high prices, which many retailers are in charge of exploiting and with which users sometimes make real "fortunes". It is not uncommon for many people to wait for the launch of certain models, knowing in advance how desired they will be, to buy and resell them, making a good amount of money in the process. In the US it is a fairly common practice, with the existence of platforms such as StockX, where resale is the order of the day -it is currently one of the services par excellence for repurchasing shoes.
And just in that business that Joe Hebert was involved in, only in his case in a fairly organized way, using bots and other applications for buying in large quantities and using his mother's credit card for payments, which was not other than the vice president of Nike.
Cook group, Discord and other concepts
Hebert's first flirtation with the buy-and-resell scene was on his return to Portland (he had just dropped out of the University of Oregon), when he heard that a man had found four pairs of shoes in an abandoned warehouse. Nike Mag sneakers (yes, the coveted sneakers from Back to the Future II). Hebert contacted him, paid him $22.000, and then resold them, getting $42.000 (almost double).
He then noticed the nicknames brick slippers (the translation would be brick in Spanish), that is, less media and popular models that can be bought more easily. Sometimes it is due to bad publicity, others to a poor reception by users, but whatever it is, it always leads to the same place: a reduction in the initial price of the shoe. That's when distributors and retailers stick their necks in and buy "in bulk," also taking advantage of discounts and coupons. Then, when they have managed to run out of them, they will start reselling them at a higher price.
Hebert got a lot of money and shared his achievements on social networks, where he had more and more followers, so he decided to open a group on Discord (an instant messaging service for VoP voice, video and text chat -interface capture below these lines-) and charge a monthly fee to those who were interested in knowing how he bought, sold, and what resale strategies he used to make gold, including the use of bots for the purchase in large units. What our protagonist never told is how he knew what was the perfect moment for resale, alluding to simply having the suitable contacts.
Then came van trips to buy sneakers from dealers across the country. The shipment with which he returned to Portland was huge, getting more fully involved in wholesale and retail sales of copies that he had obtained both directly and through online purchases, with the use of bots (in charge of the automatic purchase of units in a matter of seconds) through programs such as cyber sole -capture under these lines-, Codes y GaneshBot. These are in charge of tracking online stores in record time, reporting prices, rises and falls of products, as well as immediate launches, being able to automate purchases and fill out forms in no time. And all this without the web sales systems realizing it to avoid their action.
With the bots The purchase limitations of official stores can even be circumvented with certain releases (when the acquisition of only two pairs of shoes maximum per customer is established), something that Heber did by always using the same American Express card. In this process, of course, our entrepreneur was not alone: through Discord he led a group of 15 people or "cooking group» (group of cooks), a term used by sneaker resellers to describe their helpers, so within minutes, thanks to alerts and relentless computerized buying, they were out of stock, leaving actual buyers without options .
Who is Ann Hebert and what is she doing in all of this?
The theme in this whole story, of course, is that precisely that credit card mentioned before was not in Joe's name but in Ann Hebert. And who is she? Well, nothing more and nothing less than your mother and a Nike employee who has been with the company for over 25 years, to the point of being recently promoted as division vice president from North America -there is nothing. The firm's policy on copy buying, discounts, reselling, and the like is very strict: employees can't profit from these practices, so discovering that Ann Hebert is "behind," at least on paper, Such business has caused his immediate departure and the opening of an investigation.
Joe claims that his mother has never provided him with inside information (despite boasting in the past of having "the right connections") or discount codes. Nike also seems to be in line with these statements, at least for now, indicating that they have no indication of bad practice by Anne, but the damage has already been done and the vice president has had to leave her office.
We'll see how this ends.