How does StockX work? 

The same as a traditional stock market, StockX uses real-time pricing data to provide a true value of its goods, allowing users of the site to buy or sell immediately at the lowest listed price or place a bid that individual sellers can accept, or place an ask that a buyer might accept later. Once a bid and an ask coincide, the deal is done automatically, with StockX taking a 9.5 per cent commission. Of course, that hard market data – price volatility, 52-week highs and lows – might just as well drive prices down as up.

Sneakers and data: a strange mix? 

Data is something Luber, who used to be a strategic consultant for IBM, is comfortable with: one of his previous start-ups was Campless, which would become the default online price guide for sneakers, then based on the analysis of data harvested from eBay; now, tens of millions of transactions on StockX generate his own data. As for sneakers? He owns more than 350 pairs.

Why trade sneakers this way?

“This is the way certain products should be sold,” Luber argues. “eBay is great for those long tail, unique items. But you have no liquidity if you just have one of something, so that sort of product doesn’t work for StockX. And the Amazon model works for products of almost unlimited supply – toilet paper or whatever. But for products in between there’s nothing – products that should be sold on the basis of market supply and demand. Obviously we didn’t make this idea up. We just applied what more normally gets applied to the likes of say, oil.”

But sneakers are a special case, right? 

Any other unregulated market is subject to booms and busts, Luber notes. He says that the sneaker brands – much like many luxury goods brands – are careful to control supply to their advantage. Re-sale might not profit them directly - and that’s a market the likes of Nike could kill off overnight simply by releasing more pairs of each style. Rather it “props up an artificial commodities market, with a Facebook level hyped IPO every single weekend”. Luber estimates the global sneaker re-sale market is worth US$4 billion to US$5 billion each year, and is set to grow 20 per cent annually.

So should you be building a sneaker portfolio?

Luber argues that one might profit tidily from the buying and selling of sneakers, a legal and accessible investment opportunity. He says he owns sneakers the value of which have outperformed the Standard & Poor index, and that of Apple’s share price. “Regardless of whether you believe it’s a good or a bad thing to resell in this way, if you can buy something at US$200 and the re-sale value is US$800, who wouldn’t buy it, whether it was a pair of sneakers or a widget?” he asks. “That’s why there are huge lines [queues] at retail to buy some sneakers. And especially because there’s such a liquid market. The problem is that you can’t buy enough pairs of, say, Jordan Black Cements in order to build a real portfolio.”

How can anyone know they are buying the real deal?

StockX operates two authentification centres, where a team – each member goes through a 90 day training programme – first checks every item that goes live on StockX to make sure it is authentic. This is where knowing your Nike Air Foamposite One Paranormals from your Dunk Pro Low SB Paris matters. And knowing when a certain tiny detail is a tell-tale sign of some trickery at play.

What is in it for the less obsessive sneaker fan?

“What I really want StockX to do is give greater accessibility to these products,” says Luber, “for people who wouldn’t have the inclination to wait for hours outside a shop to buy at retail, or to wade through eBay listings for months to get the pair of sneakers they want. People with a little bit of disposable income, who are into sneakers, can go into a Footlocker and see, say, 150 options. They can go on StockX and see thousands.”

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