How did a pair of Nike online celebrity shoes that sold for more than 100,000 be “artificially” created?

Which sneaker is the hottest this year?

There is no way to get an exact answer to this question in many years. After all, there are enough sneakers on sale, and everyone has their own love. It is difficult to get an answer that everyone can believe in.

But before halfway through 2021, we seem to already know the answer-Nike Dunk.

The popular fried chicken Dunk, the second-hand market is extremely hot

Look at how many people like a pair of shoes, don't look at its sale price, but look at its price in the second-hand market. As the second-hand market for sneakers becomes more and more perfect, this seems to have become a law. When enough enthusiasts are waving large sums of money to pay for a pair of shoes, it shows that this pair of shoes is worthwhile, and there is a high room for appreciation.

"Shoemaker" Travis Scott and Nike's joint shoe Nike SB Dunk Low was fired at a high price. When it was first released, the enthusiasm of the secondary market had already set a price of 7000. As a result, the enthusiasm of the market has increased unabated, and it is still in the range of 11000-15000.

Off-White and Nike's Dunk Low series also have a lot of premiums, of which the most premium is the green pair, which is between 5,000-10,000 yuan. On the trend e-commerce platform Dewu, 22,370 people have already paid for this pair of shoes.

If the price co-branded with the Off-White brand is considered restrained, the addition of the "explosive model manufacturing machine" Supreme makes this price a bit crazy. The Supreme x Nike SB Dunk Low series officially released not long ago, few people actually wear the shoes, and some secondary market asking prices exceed 4W.

Old shoes are rejuvenating, and the popular market is also indispensable for those old shoes. In 2007, the Nike SB Dunk High Sample Quasimoto regained a new life on Travis Scott's feet and sold 14W. Shoes in general condition also sold 8W.

What is interesting is also the co-branded shoe The ebay Dunk created by Nike for charity auction in 2003. The shoes used eBay's color scheme. In the same year, they were auctioned for $3,000 on eBay. In order to ensure that the shoes received by the auctioneers are unique and customized shoes, the sample shoes are cut at the end of the auction, which is really cut into four pieces with a saw.

All of this may have been unexpected to the Dunk designer who went online in 1985. After all, from the beginning, Dunk was a "frustrated shoe" that failed the competition.

Dunk, dunking, is the most exciting action in basketball. As a combination of Nike's three best-selling shoes, Dunk has taken on a lot of expectations when it came out. In addition to integrating existing successes, Dunk also has innovations. In the 1980s when sneakers were almost all white, Dunk was one of the earliest shoes with multiple color blocks.

But it is also a pair of dull sports shoes-because this is a pair of basketball shoes. At that time, the basketball market had a breakthrough in Jordan 1, and people didn't need Dunk. At that time, Dunk basically could only stay in the discount area, waiting for the less wealthy children to take them home.

Fortunately, a large part of these less wealthy children love skateboarding. Skateboarding and basketball have similar needs for shoes, which created the foundation for Dunk's popularity in skateboarding. After Dunk connected the skateboard, everything was different.

Through the spread of street culture, Dunk has become a mirror of youth culture. It integrates skateboarding, street art, design… and is gradually accepted by mainstream culture. It can be said that Dunk, like Air Force 1 and Cortez, has cultural attributes and also has loyal fans.

In early 2000, after Nike realized that the joint name was the future, they also discovered that Dunk was the most suitable white canvas. There was no shelf life for this insight. Twenty years later, when Nike's co-branded models were all sought after and sold hot, Dunk became the main shoe model created by Nike again.

Scoop Jackson, editor of the American basketball magazine "Slam", said: "Dunk is not only a canvas of niche culture, it is also a canvas of pop culture. Its era has come, and it has a greater significance than in the past."

Artificially create popular shoes, Nike plays like this

Fashion changes rapidly, but business has a trace.

If you want to create a hot shoe of the year, it's not enough to sit and wait for consumers to find you. On the 35th anniversary of Dunk's launch, Phil McCartney, Nike's vice president of global footwear, said that they were already planning this in 2017. "We deliberately brought Dunk back to ensure that we not only affect existing consumers, but also new consumers."

In order to influence more consumers, Nike's first step is to arouse people's memory of it. That was Dunk's first marketing campaign. As this shoe is about to be released, Nike launched today's iconic "Be True to Your School" series of ads, which is also one of the most effective ads in the brand's history.

Nike sponsored the first-tier university team in the league at that time, providing students and players with uniformly designed sports shoes, and then selling the same shoes to their respective campuses, so that students in the school can have the same style. Slowly, these series of sports shoes designed for schools even became the sports shoes of a state, and everyone wore them to show their identities.

Today, school design is also coming back to the pot. Syracuse University and the University of Kentucky both have their own Dunk shoes. When the unique and iconic Dunk shoes spread among the regions, sneaker collectors began to "collect stamps." The sale of this vintage shoe was the first shot for Dunk's resurgence.

Then, we must let more customers know that this shoe is not only a shoe, but also a culture. To this end, Nike filmed the "The Story of Dunk" documentary to tell the story behind the shoes and share its unique community culture.

The second step is to intensively launch joint shoes, not only to remind people of it, but also to make people fall in love with it. Celebrities, well-known brands, cities, artists… only we can't think of it, but Nike can't do it. As long as there is enough cooperation and more people know, the value of sneakers will increase to a higher level.

These shoes not only have a large number of styles, but also have a small number of purchase channels. This richness does not mean that each product can be bought through different channels, but that each product may have a unique sales channel. Nike's SNKRS app, the official website of the partner band, a specific store, a specific distributor…

Limited edition and hard to buy, these make Dunk more popular. In order to create a popular shoe that continues to be popular, Nike's third step begins-to find a better balance between scarcity and scale.

This is a problem that giants all encounter. When your product is under-stocked, its popularity and market response may not be good, but if your product is too well-stocked, customers will lose interest in your product, because everyone on the street will have it.

In order to deal with this problem, Adidas used the "wide first, then tight" method to promote Stan Smith. In the initial stage, try to increase publicity and increase the number of products. After the products receive positive feedback, the number of products will be gradually tightened to prevent customers from getting tired of similar products.

Nike's approach is to differentiate between different products, create scarce products through limited quantities and joint names, and then manufacture large-scale products. Scarce products attract your customers' attention, and large-scale products are bought and worn by most customers. But despite the parallelism of the two lines, it is not easy to make similar decisions. Phil McCartney, Nike's vice president of footwear, said that deciding how many pairs to issue for each pair of shoes is very difficult.

This may be the most controversial issue for us as a team.

Luxury brand Nike, mass brand Nike

At this point, you may find that Nike is not the brand you are familiar with.

On the one hand, you can still buy a pair of Dunk shoes at the normal price in the store in front of your home, and the expensive ones rarely exceed 2,000. On the other hand, if you look at the sky-high price of Dunk shoes in the secondary market, you may wonder if it uses any space materials and gold bottom surface, otherwise why a few pairs of shoes can make up the down payment for a suite.

Nike of the former is a popular brand you are familiar with, and Nike of the latter has become a luxury brand.

That's right, luxury. Although the price of a pair of Nike shoes is still a hundred yuan-level consumer product, the secondary market has become a luxury product with a price of tens of thousands. In the secondary market, many Dunk's prices are over 10,000, and the price exceeds that of traditional luxury brand footwear products such as LV and Gucci.

Jesse Einhorn, a senior economist at the trendy e-commerce platform StockX, said: "We have never seen such a situation before, where the price of a single product has reached such a high level. Although the retail price is $100, they are essentially a luxury sport. Shoes. "

Selling some special products at high prices to innovate the brand phenomenon in the minds of customers is also a common method for luxury goods. LV's plastic vests and Tiffany's high-priced paper clips do not exist to sell to more people, but to leave consumers with an impression of "this brand is very special and high-end".

When customers recognize the value of the brand, low-priced products begin to sell, such as the popular cosmetics line for luxury goods.

You can also think of it as "Drop innovation." This is a marketing method commonly used by luxury goods companies in recent years to keep customers fresh by increasing the rate of new products. They create a sense of urgency and scarcity for customers. Even if the products that customers want to buy are easy to manufacture in batches, brands need to control the quantity. This is the "hunger marketing" that belongs to fashion brands.

Before Dunk tried this model, Jordan's success had already given Nike a lot of confidence. Using the same marketing method, Jordan's revenue reached 3.6 billion US dollars last year. This strategy of paralleling luxury goods and mass brands has proven effective.

It is worth mentioning that Nike does not directly benefit from the luxury products it creates. Those who benefit from this system include sneaker enthusiasts, investors, and various distributors, who have built this huge luxury brand together.

Nike is also not "greedy." It knows that it can get higher profits without producing enough shoes. When you are running a mass brand and a luxury brand at the same time, you must make a plan. You cannot reduce customer demand because of product saturation, and you cannot reduce customer enthusiasm because of the supply of goods.

When using accurate market insights and production estimates to create online celebrity shoes, Nike must take both into account to ensure that its "two" brands can get the most benefits. In response, Matt Powell, a sports industry analyst at market research firm NPD, said :

You can build a business empire, but all of this must be thoughtful, accurate analysis, scientific judgment, not greed.

This will be a very long game.

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