Consumers Will Decide The Price Of Streetwear

It is always interesting to wonder what new designers will come into the fray. I’m curious to see how a brand like Supreme will keep performing over the next 10 years. We think of fashion as a 25-year cycle and we’re [at] 25 years of Supreme now. How will it continue to scale globally? We’re at the anniversary of some of these reverential brands in streetwear and I think from a brand perspective that’s going to be interesting to watch.

I would keep an eye on what Aries and Liam Hodges are doing over the next decade. London, in particular, has always had a strong voice in shaping streetwear culture with brands like Palace, Gimme 5, and people like Kim Jones at Dior, which will certainly continue strongly into the next decade.

Streetwear is quite uniquely unisex in terms of the look but I hope we’ll see a lot more unisex sizing over the existing brands so everyone can participate more widely in the way they want to.

Drop culture will also evolve. At the moment, some brand’s commercial strategies will often try to leverage scarcity to create a false sense of hype or demand. I think that will get harder to achieve as the marketplace becomes even more crowded, and people demand a product that’s meaningful, not just hype.

At StockX we see drop culture morphing into what we call our Initial Product Offering.

We did an Adidas IPO in October 2019 with three different sneaker designs. Adidas put them directly on Stockx and instead of setting a price point you went on to Stockx and put how much you’re willing to pay for your size. After 72 hours, we closed all the bids and all winners in a given size were charged the same amount – what is called the “Clearing Price. If the highest bid was £1,000 and the lowest was £200 then everyone got the shoes for £200. It’s the same shoe, everyone should pay the same price. There’s no fights, no campouts – just the product and how much you’re willing to pay for that.

That’s the big idea of StockX. We believe in empowering the consumer and giving them the data on how much they should pay. That’s the future of drop culture certainly, instead of a release where everyone is clambering to get it, the fans can’t get it and then it re-selling for a lot more.