Numlock Sunday: Kim Bhasin on the sneaker boom

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Kim Bhasin, who wrote “One Couple’s Fight to Stop the ‘Gentrification’ of Sneaker Collecting” for Bloomberg. Here's what I wrote about it:

Sneaker collecting and trading has been a popular hobby for quite some time, but now that there’s a ton of money in it, many people who have been fans of the hobby since the beginning and made it popular to begin with have been driven out. The streetwear resale market has reached an estimated $2 billion in North America and is growing 20 percent annually, which is nice for investors but kind of a bummer if you just want to look fresh. The resale value — the latest Air Jordan 1s in Carolina blue sold out instantly at $170 retail and immediately appeared on marketplaces for $300 — is driving smaller, passionate consumers out of the market amid a robotically-enhanced, optimized and well capitalized investor class.

This story was great as it highlights a lot of intersecting things…