Today adidas announced a further release of YEEZY inventory with a range of existing products being available in phases throughout the month of August across the world. As previously communicated, adi
On the adidas site and throughout social media the noise around Yeezy has increased since adidas is continuing to liquidate the inventory. Instead of focusing on who is buying the product, it reminded me to revisit a post I made last year stating that resale is slowing down. To be clear resale is an extremely diverse market. There are different aspects which have to be explained and I’ve done this on various occasions here on the site. For the sake of this post and previous posts showing year over year, I’m looking only at the term “Yeezy+men” to keep it simple. I am also going to focus on previous information discussed since the Yeezy relationship was dissolved.
Is adidas in Trouble Without Yeezy? – ARCH-USA
It’s been almost a year since adidas ended their business with Ye. In previous charts I looked at resale value of Yeezy prior to the relationship ending. The dates for that information on eBay was October 2021 to October 2022. Below is November 2022 to July 2023. It’s a smaller window of course, but I predict as I write this the numbers will not have grown. If resale is built on scarcity and demand, Yeezy being absent from the market should have driven prices higher, logically. I tend to think “out of sight, out of mind”. Here are the previous 2021-2022 charts first:
Below are the dates of November 2022 to July 2023. Using the same keywords of adidas sneakers +men and Yeezy + men. I have to admit I made a mistake in using “sneakers” for the adidas search. I should have simply used adidas. What is being shown here for eBay data? adidas remained steady. Remember this data doesn’t include the next few months of sales. By these numbers adidas resale will grow on eBay. Yeezy data, however, is in a continued decline. While it makes sense that there wouldn’t be the same volume, Average Sold Price should have increased since the sneakers are no longer distributed consistently. There wasn’t an increase in the Average Sold Price which holds true to the research done on the brand. Yeezy had been in decline for almost all models except the Foam Runners and Slides. On StockX the “Most Popular models continue to be very similar to the previous years list with the addition of new Slides and Foam Runners. This shows that Yeezy only has value when it can be resold and these recent drops by adidas aren’t moving the needle for resale on adidas and Yeezy. Did you think that Yeezy would drive resale? Is this surprising or not surprising at all considering the resale market? Will these numbers improve over the next few months as Yeezy sneakers are dropped?
Note: I continue to utilize StockX and Amazon for 3rd party data, but eBay remains a continued platform for hype, retail, arbitrage and casual sellers of sneakers. eBay also offers a considerable amount of data. I’ve begun to work on utilizing a recent addition to the resale market in Tradeblock, but the work there thus far is nil. Tradeblock, unlike the other platforms, does not have an interface catering to Buy Now features. That app takes sneaker meetups and sneaker conventions and amplifies the experience lending itself to the search for more hyped products. This could be problematic for the platform. After tracking StockX since its inception, the reason that platform has become so important taking market share away from eBay is because of the ability to sell immediately to a customer who functions like an Amazon.com consumer. I’ll talk about Tradeblock in another post after continued research.