During the old adage, “Find a job that you love, you will never work one day in your life,” it is safe to assume that it was good before the age of YouTuber, “Planned Parenthood” and the stock market.
StockX may have been a multi-million dollar juggernaut spread across cultures with greater impact today, but it began to jump in to transform personal plans into business plans. For founder Josh Luber, his love of keeping sneakers apart from his career was initially very purposeful. As he continued to invest in his hobby, he noticed something from his corporate jobs that was completely missing from the sneakers-data. A more different perspective emerges as he establishes and pigeons more deeply into numbers. After a basketball game, a check and a business, StockX was born.
The timing was significantly lucky. Over the past decade, sneakers have become increasingly angry at the niche, and so has the demand for proven materials. This section puts together a few other companies needed to effectively market.
Startup Unicorn screams more than Microsoft Excel that online sales started out as the main price chart has now become one of the most attractive markets in the world.
Prior to being a co-founder of StockX, Josh Luber was consulting at IBM, intentionally working outside of sneakers to keep it strictly out of the hobby. This setup continued until he realized the opportunity to sort data around his favorite collection. Markets cannot exist without prices, and it is difficult to determine the price of a sneaker in the secondary market a decade ago. Of course there were retail prices, but popular sneakers often gained value according to demand depending on the time, which can fluctuate wildly over time.
Luber and a team of 17 volunteers founded Campus, a regularly updated sneaker secondary market price guide that launched in 2012, by scraping data openly for more than 13 million transactions on EB. Greg Schwartz, COO and co-founder of StockX, said, “Although it had many flaws and required a lot of manual work, it probably gave the best reference point of the time.” The Campless team was simply pulling prices from e-bay auctions and analyzing trends from there, as any private seller would probably do before posting their own shoes.
Although increasing the size of the dataset, they were getting much more accurate market-clearing prices than was available to both buyers and sellers. Like the Kelly Blue Book in the auto industry, which provides approximate values for cars by model and year, Campless offers a number of secondary sneakers in the market that will eventually become a tentpole and proprietary offer on StockX.
