Sneaker resale is a unique case study: very few comparable consumer goods can command such high prices on the aftermarket. You might be wondering about art, antiques, and vintage cars. Still, these things are fundamentally different from sneakers because their supply is finite, and they have a natural scarcity.
With sneakers, the scarcity of them is artificially created. Famous sneaker producers could make and sell more of their limited-edition sneakers (i.e., Yeezy 350s), but they choose not to.
Resale is hard, and it’s not for everybody. But it’s a core part of the sneaker culture.
The key to reselling sneakers for a big profit isn’t only about selling the rarest shoes. It’s also about selling the right sneaker sizes. The most highly sought-after shoes will almost always sell for the biggest retail price, but not every size will be sold for the same price on the resale market.
So, what is the best shoe size to resell? How do you know which sneaker sizes to pick?
In this article, we’re going to discuss all of these things, and then some, to help you figure out the best shoe size to resell. The information contained in this article is meant to help anyone just starting in the shoe reselling business and anyone who has been in the business for a while.
Critical Considerations to Help You Figure Out the Best Shoe Size to Resell
It would help if you thought about several things before purchasing shoes for your inventory that will help you determine what the best shoe size to resell is. Here are just a few of the most important considerations:
How the Supply Affects Resale Value
To figure out the best shoe size to resell, you must first think about the most common shoe sizes that people wear. When you do this, you also need to think about the availability of specific sizes.
When there’s a high demand and a low supply for a specific size (i.e., men’s size 16), the resale prices will be extremely high and allow you to sell the shoe quickly.
There are a few different ways to figure out how much inventory of a certain size will be available to the market. The first way is to read and follow sneaker news sites that sometimes share inventory information. If you decide to follow this route, you need to ensure that you’re following reputable sites. Otherwise, your information won’t be correct.
Another way to determine how much inventory there will be is by checking store websites for the sneaker releases. To figure out how much stock there is for a particular size, you’ll need to compare the available sizes for each store website that you visit. You’ll find that some stores won’t have certain sizes available. You’ll then use this information to speculate on how much inventory there is for those sizes.
For example, if all five stores you checked have a women’s size 7 offered, chances are there will be an enormous inventory for that size. But if only two out of five stores have a women’s size 12 offered, there’s going to be low inventory for that size. So, the women’s size 12 will probably resell for a much higher price than a women’s size 7.
Finally, you can follow some online groups that can provide you with necessary information about sneaker inventory. These “cook groups” use store API data and other leaked information to give you the inventory data. Within these groups, you can sometimes see accurate store lists of actual inventory data numbers showing the exact number of sneakers for each size the store will carry.
The Difference Between Retro and Hype Sneakers
Another key consideration for the best shoe size to resell is typically seen in retro sneakers versus hype sneakers. For example, you’re more likely to see that a pair of Jordan brand retros in sizes 9 to 12 and a pair of Yeezy’s in sizes 5 to 7 are the best shoe sizes to resell.
Why is this? Because retro sneakers tend to be more popular with older sneaker collectors than hype sneakers. However, there is an exception to this, and those are the Jordan 1 retro sneakers. These sneakers are popular amongst young sneaker collectors too.
Those who collect new hype sneakers tend to be college students and teenagers, which means they have much smaller feet than older sneaker collectors. This is why different sizes or larger sizes are more popular for different collector types. So, because of this, it’s important to know if the shoes you’re reselling are considered hype or retro.
Another thing to consider when flipping shoes is that sneakers from limited collabs don’t have as much power on the resale market as you might think. Some limited collabs, such as Nike x Off-White, have incredible resale premiums, but other collabs, such as Adidas x Pharrell, have not-so-great returns.
What Are Your Goals?
The best shoe size to resell also depends on your goals. For most sneaker resellers, the best goal should be to find sneakers that will sell quickly. If you want to sell sneakers full time, your long-term goal should be to build up your inventory over time so you can resell a high volume to your buyer.
This means that you won’t be as focused on finding the rarest sneaker in the rarest size but instead finding the best-selling sneaker in sizes that will sell the fastest.
You must have a high volume of resale sneakers because, for the most part, sneakers will resell at a small profit margin. However, if you sell in a large volume, you can multiply those profit margins together to get something that’s much larger. This is what you need if you’re a full-time sneaker reseller who needs to pay bills.
If you’re only planning on reselling shoes as a side hustle, then you have much more flexibility in the best shoe size to resell. Instead of having a large inventory, you can focus on finding the sneakers in the sizes that will sell for the most profit, which can take longer to sell. This is often referred to as “holding” a sneaker.
Focus on Fast Selling Sizes
Being a sneaker reseller means that you have to focus on finding sneakers that will sell fast. This also means that you need to be willing to accept a profit of about $15 on a pair of sneakers. Keep in mind that if you make a profit of $15 on 15 pairs of sneakers, that’s a total profit of $225. This is especially true if you need to keep moving sneakers to make a living.
This means that you could be making over $70 of profits on a pair of sneakers if the size is hard to find. But if you have sneakers that are rare and in rare sizes that you can make bigger profits on that won’t move as fast, that’s okay too. Just remember to avoid making that your entire inventory if you need to make a living off selling sneakers.
The biggest mistake that new sneaker resellers make is that they want to try to maximize the profit they make on every single pair of sneakers they resell. If you do this when sneaker reselling, selling a pair of sneakers can take months or longer. You don’t want this to happen.
You want to avoid holding up too much money in your inventory because profitable sneakers are released almost weekly. If your money is tied up in your inventory, then you might not be able to purchase those new, hot, trendy sneakers. By holding out for a significant profit on every pair of sneakers you try to resell, you could be missing out on more significant profits on the new sneaker releases.
Other Ways to Figure Out the Best Shoe Size to Resell
Now that we’ve discussed the key considerations when it comes to figuring out the best shoe size to resell, let’s talk about a couple of other external sources that you can use to help you figure out the best shoe size to resell.
Gather Information from a Cook Group
We talked earlier about a cook group and the information that one can provide you about the inventory of certain sneaker sizes. However, a good cook group can give you more information than just that.
A good cook group can also give you good predictions on which shoe sizes you should target when you go to resell certain sneakers. By joining a reputable cook group, you could save yourself quite a bit of research on sneakers each week.
However, that doesn’t mean that you should solely rely on your cook group to do your research for you: research is the most important thing you can do to be successful in the sneaker resale business.
As you continue to grow in the sneaker resale industry, you’ll start to develop an eye for knowing which cook groups are good and which aren’t. Because of this, you might have to leave and join a few different groups because you might start to notice that predictions are off and some of the information isn’t correct. But that’s okay; it’s all a learning curve.
Use StockX
StockX is an online marketplace and reseller primarily of sneakers. StockX provides insightful information to sneaker resellers about the best shoe size to resell.
The best way to use StockX to figure out the best shoe size to resell is by looking at the bidding price of certain sneaker sizes. This is the best and easiest way to see what real people are willing to pay for a pair of sneakers in a certain size.
With this site, you can also check the sales history of certain shoes to see how many pairs were sold, and it will tell you the number of pairs sold and at what price. It will give you the average resale price for a certain sneaker too.
Use Flight Club
You can also resell shoes on Flight Club. It is actually one of the easiest ways for resellers to sell off new and lightly worn sneakers. They have a network of retail stores in New York, Los Angeles, and Miami, and offer a premier online experience.
Conclusion
Sneakers are a unique consumer good because the scarcity of certain sneakers is artificially created. More Yeezy’s could be made, but Adidas chooses not to. So, in a way, sneakers can be much like collectibles – just much more popular.
The resale of sneakers is a challenging game, especially since you have to take into consideration all of the different sizes available. A reseller must pick and choose which sizes and collections to purchase and resell before knowing which shoes will continue to be popular and in demand. So, how do they know which is the best shoe size to resell?
Several factors need to be considered when figuring out which is the best shoe size to resell. These factors include the shoe’s supply, the collector’s age, and the reseller’s goals. All of these things need to be thought about because they’re all incredibly important.
If you don’t think about the supply of the shoes, you won’t know which shoe sizes will be the rarest or the most in-demand, and you also won’t know how many pairs of that sneaker collection will be released to the public.
If you don’t know the collector’s age, or if the shoe is considered “hype” or “retro,” then you also won’t know what size to get of a certain shoe. This is because hype shoes tend to go to younger collectors who have smaller feet, and retro shoes go to older collectors who have larger feet.
Finally, you need to know your goals. If you plan to do sneaker resale as a full-time job, you need to focus on building up your inventory and selling shoes fast. However, if you’re only flipping sneakers as a side gig, you can afford to search for shoes that will have the highest profit margin.
Hopefully, this article has helped you gain a better understanding of the best shoe size to resell.
