How StockX Built A Billion $$ Dollar Sneaker Resale Empire
StockX is an online marketplace for luxury sneakers, handbags and apparel like Retro Jordans, a Hermes Birkin Himalayan crocodile bag in matte, or a Rolex Oyster Perpetual watch. You can even find extremely rare Pokemon cards like a Charizard-Holo 1999 base set 1st edition. In November 2018, StockX sold its most expensive item ever: a 70,000-dollar Louis Vuitton x Supreme Malle Courier Trunk. By June of 2019, the Detroit-based company reportedly reached a $1 billion valuation. In half a decade, StockX went from a simple price guide for sneakers to a reselling empire and it has its sights on disrupting the retail market.
Before co-founding StockX, Josh Luber ran three tech startups and joined the corporate world as a consultant at IBM in 2010. Luber was a sneaker head, but “almost intentionally avoided creating any businesses that had to do anything with sneakers.” While researching data at IBM, Luber realized eBay was the biggest marketplace for sneaker reselling, but with multiple sellers listing different prices for the same product.
Luber figured that the sneaker reselling market would benefit from following an exchange model. This system would help alleviate uncertainty and mean that every sneaker listed on the exchange has one true market value. In 2012, Luber started a side project called Campless, which scraped data from eBay resellers to look at prices for all sneakers sold on the platform via auction. This essentially created a shoe reselling price guide for sneakerheads.
