Sneaker resale is big business. The market is currently worth around $2 billion globally, and it’s expected to grow to $30 billion by 2030.
But for the individual sellers who make their living from the business of buying and selling sneakers, it can be a risky vocation even as the market sees continued growth. Mustafa Hamed, a reseller who sells millions of dollars worth of sneakers through StockX every year, said the business has grown increasingly cutthroat as more people see the opportunity and enter the market.
“I’m lucky in that I got into it before Covid so I had to learn what sells,” Hamed said. He noted that the boom in sneaker resale during the pandemic meant new sellers could flip things easily, despite never having learned the skill of identifying a hot-selling item before it blows up. A former minor league baseball player, Hamed took to sneaker reselling in 2017 when he sold a pair of Nike Bearbrick SB Dunks and made a $70 profit.
Hamed agreed to walk Glossy through some of the numbers of his most recent year of reselling sneakers to give a glimpse into what the business looks like from the perspective of an established seller.
In 2023, Hamed sold more than 50,000 pairs of sneakers with a total product value of over $6 million. He can process as many as 1,000 orders in a single day, though he typically sells about 1,500 pairs a week and 5,000-8,000 per month. He attributes his efficiency to StockX Pro, a dashboard of features on the StockX platform that is geared toward power sellers. It lets them edit and update listings at a rate of 1,000 items in an hour. Processing an order involves accepting a payment and beginning the shipping process, which is completed by StockX.
“One day, I got home from the gym at 11:30 and finished 200 orders by 11:55,” Hamed said.
Early on in his career as a reseller, Hamed ran the operation alone, but in the last year, he was able to expand the business. His girlfriend helps co-manage the business, plus, ahead of Black Friday, he hired three full-time permanent employees to fulfill orders. While he used to house stacks of shoeboxes in his house, he now uses a StockX-owned warehouse in New Jersey. Black Friday is a particularly big time of the year for sneakers. In October, Hamed stored 6,000 pairs of shoes in the New Jersey warehouse, and after Black Friday, only a thousand remained.
Sellers on StockX are anonymous, and Hamed doesn’t advertise his business anywhere. Instead, success on the platform is simply a matter of anticipating what’s going to be popular and stocking up accordingly. Hamed said choosing shoes that eventually have a high resale value is based on a mix of art and science.
“You have to be 100% in; you have to pick up on trends before anyone else if you want to make some money,” Hamed said. “Like the [Adidas] Samba trend that was big [in 2022.] It’s a $100 shoe, but they were selling at 250% of retail, like $250. That’s an insane markup if you can be ahead enough to buy them up at the retail price.”
Hamed said the profit margin on Sambas was exceptionally high. He sources his sneakers from a variety of places and typically pays close to retail price for them. The biggest challenge with sourcing, Hamed said, is outpacing the bots that some sellers use to automatically buy hyped sneakers the moment they drop. Brands like Nike have taken steps to inhibit the bots, but the problem still persists throughout the industry.
He cited Uggs as another big seller last year. He sold 4,000 pairs of them in 2023. Other major sellers were the Nike SB Dunk Panda and white-on-white Air Force 1s. Considering the brand’s dominance in the industry, it should come as no surprise that Nike was, by far, the best-selling brand in Hamed’s portfolio. Adidas and New Balance were also big sellers, along with Crocs.
But despite the positive growth, the business of reselling sneakers requires risk-taking. Hamed said he can spend up to $200,000 when buying up a sneaker’s inventory in bulk, but if the shoe doesn’t sell through, he sees a loss. One sneaker he took a $200,000 bet on last year was the Nike Air Max 1 Ironstone, which ended up being his biggest selling product of the year. But not every risk pays off. While he declined to offer specific numbers, Hamed made a similarly big bet on the viral MSCHF Big Red Boots, which resulted in a “fat loss”, he said.
