The after market for "exclusive" sneakers is at a crazy peak right now. You can buy a $250 shoe and flip it for $500-$1000 nearly instantly. So it's not just old school sneakerheads looking for cool shoes - it's big business.
There are whole sub-industries within this bubble, too. People selling sneakerbot code, people selling purchase alert services, people selling access to private dischord groups that alert you to upcoming sales, etc. It's huge.
My co-worker and I (he was into sneakers, I was into money) used to have a nice little business arbitraging sneakers. Pretty easy to make 100%-500% returns with a little code and some ebay dedication.
yeah the whole hypebeast streetwear black market is huge, especially for shoes and supreme/big drops
the most interesting part is looking at stockx with the charts they have on items, I have shoes/silhouettes that I bought on sale/new through retail that have since sold out and seeing 2x return on investment isnt uncommon
There’s also a really unexpected connection with sneaker-buying bots, which was a surprise to me. I did not know the lengths to which sneakerheads would go to to procure new shoes. I wonder if these backdoor bots are used just to give someone an extra leg up on online auctions and sales of sneakers...that’s some real twisted dedication right there.