Why the adidas MakerLab Limited-Edition Campus 80s x StockX IPO is Flawed for Both StockX and adidas

Chris Burns012 mins
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Honoring its ongoing ambition to elevate creators worldwide, adidas presents Campus 80s MakerLab , the next chapter of the brand’s collaborative-creation platform that unleashes unlimited possibilitie

Source: adidas MakerLab propels emerging designers to bring limited-edition Campus 80s Into the Global Marketplace

When Josh Luber started StockX the immediate idea behind the company was to truly become a stock market of things. As the company moved in scale and in valuation he announced over and over that the endgame was to be a place where the fair market value of a product could be delivered through an IPO for new products. There have been several successful launches of these IPOs with a LeBron x Cleveland Cavs Homecourt IPO and a Ben Baller Slide IPO. Both of these “events” were for extremely limited items. This adidas collaboration is interesting for a number of reasons and it arrives at a time where it seems the world is just catching on to what I wrote about Nike and small accounts years ago. DTC has shifted the relationship between retail and brands. adidas is creating another hard shift at a time where I don’t think the brand should be making this type of play in conjunction with a third party marketplace. I don’t want to get confusing, so let me slow down.

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In a first for MakerLab, 333 limited-edition pairs of each model will launch via a StockX IPO on October 15th, 2019. The IPO model bridges the conversation between creator and buyer, removing bots, campouts, raffles, or plugs, and empowering the buyer to set the retail price.
The 72-hour auction will begin 21:00 EDT, October 15th and run through 21:00 EDT, October 18th where users can select their preferred designs and size on the platform.  Through a blind bid, each consumer will offer how much they are willing to pay for their selected model of the Campus 80s.  Winners, or highest bidders, will all secure the shoes at the “Clearing Price” or the lowest winning Bid on a specific size and design of the shoe.
The IPO will close at 21:00 EDT on Friday, October 18, 2019 with the highest winning bids matched by availability.
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The goal of a limited drop is to generate interest across the brand. The goal of a limited release is to gain enough interest that people who usually wouldn’t hear about a drop from a brand will take interest and it will contribute to new fans of the brand.
The problem is StockX has grown in scope through the continuous advertisement of the site for customer acquisitions. The site now reaches a different customer. A customer who isn’t really interested in hyped shoes, but they are interested in bargains. I can say this because of the drop in the average transaction price. The drop in the average sales price per transaction indicates that a different consumer is visiting the site. Where the site originally drove engagement with high end sneakerheads looking for hard to find drops, the site has become a haven for clearance items. The amount of shoes being sold below retail and at deep discounts is clear evidence that people are not looking to StockX as only a “hyped” shoe release platform solely.
This creates a few issues for StockX. The people who are looking at this IPO are not the same people who only ten months ago set the average price for a pair of slides at, “10,000 Bids on the 800 slides listed, and because of the unique pricing method, using our take on a blind dutch auction, the black slides sold at an average Clearing Price of $181 and the red at $260.”
In August I wrote a report on my average price per transaction on StockX. In the post I explained that:

In my book, Nike’s Consumer Direct Offense, Amazon and StockX: The Disruption of Sneaker Retail, I shared my per transaction for 2018. Here is the paragraph from the book.

$583,244 / 4270 = $136.59 hints at what the chart above establishes. StockX has shifted demographics. The site is no longer pulling in people because of shoes that have hit resale, or are limited; the site is capturing sales on a considerable amount of “non-sneakerhead” shoes listed on the site. I happen to think the least expensive shoes sold could be higher from 30-100, but the site does not list a lot of shoes.

In the book the drop from 2017 was from around 170 dollars a pair. The numbers from August saw the average transaction at around 87 dollars per pair. If I take the average of all of my sales on StockX since I hit 1 million dollars in 18 months the numbers are really interesting. I hit 1 million dollars in sales on June 22nd, 2019. It took 18 months. The number of shoes I sold were right around 7,000. Since June 22nd my sales are at around 2,121 at $253,632.00 at an average price of $119.58.
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This fluctuation in prices happened for a number of reasons. Let’s get back to why this IPO is flawed.
Two reasons:
  1. The summer transactions were due to the typical slowdown before school. The increase the last few months is due to back-to-school. A site like StockX should never shift according to traditional shopping seasons since the premise of the site is that a customer can find limited release items. This underscores a serious issue that no one is really addressing. StockX’s consumer is shifting. The diminishing resale per transaction means that StockX is losing sellers. A healthy consignment shop allows for a consistent amount of product being available. StockX is losing the average reseller because the bids are basically lowball offers which are being accepted.
  2. adidas has retail partners they are ignoring to release a shoe with a website that doesn’t have an account with the brand. StockX is not a retail outlet. A shoe that is limited should always be given to the wholesale partners who have been working hard to move adidas’ product. Unless adidas has limited release product in the pipeline for their retail accounts the brand could find itself falling out of favor with buyers.This is also important, if adidas places this limited release into the hands of its best retail accounts when the shoe sells out the store could gain residual sales from visitors to the store helping to clear older inventory. This is the type of event that creates an experience. adidas is giving StockX and experiential marketing event which is unheard for a third party/online platform.
As popular as StockX has become, and although I state that the site is functioning like traditional retail, the site is still not as popular or as prominent as it could be which means that there are openings that will be discovered by the end of this IPO. If I’m wrong and this IPO goes off without any problems and is successful it becomes a case study for how adidas could shift their release options away from under-performing accounts. I think maybe that I’m hoping that this IPO is flawed. Traditional retail is already facing considerable pressure from Nike’s Consumer Direct Offense. If adidas, who hasn’t introduced a strategy for DTC/growth, finds a partner in StockX it could send another shot through traditional retail.
That’s not a good thing.

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