Thursday 29 December 2016

Trying reselling for myself!

After being inspired by Isabelle and Charlie's vintage reselling success, I was eager to try it for myself. So, I went out into Winton high street in Bournemouth to see what I could find. After browsing through a few charity shops and finding nothing more than old knitted jumpers, worn out slippers and multiple copies of 'Hot Fuzz' on DVD, I started to give up hope. Until I reached The Trussell Trust charity shop. I was sifting through the shirts and went to take one particular one out that I thought looked quite funny, a plain white shirt with a gold sparkly crown on the chest pocket and a printed watch on the right sleeve. I was showing it to my friend who had come shopping with me and he noticed that the writing under the crown said 'Love Moschino'. To my disbelief I checked the labels inside the shirt to discover that I'd found a legitimate Moschino shirt and, after searching online, found that the retail price was £145! (I can't find the original link but click here to see the black version of the shirt on ASOS). The shirt cost me £15 which is really expensive for a charity shop but they must've had an inkling about the true value of the shirt. When I got home I set up my Depop account and with some help from my housemates I listed my first charity shop find. (Check out my account here)



















You won't quite be able to see the caption but it reads: "Love Moschino white shirt. RRP was £145. Grab yourself a bargain. Size L. Fits TTS. In great condition, a harsh 8/10 as there is 1 crystal missing on the watch. However this is not noticibale when worn. Please feel free to make me any offers. #supreme #palace#antisocialsocialclub".

I received my offer for the shirt at £40 but I've decided to hold out to see if I can get more. 




Thursday 22 December 2016

My interview with Brandon Taylor: an insight into middlemanning

On the 20th of December I visited Brandon Taylor at his home in Southampton. At 23, Brandon is a professional middleman as well as a daily vlogger on YouTube and popular figure in the Facebook streetwear turned youth culture group called The Basement (the Facebook group is invite only but you can check out the new and improved website here). It was through this Facebook group that Brandon’s career began.

Thursday 24 November 2016

An interview with Dr Sue Eccles: consumer behaviour expert

I sat down with Dr Sue Eccles - an expert in consumer behaviour - to find out more about what drives people to buy Supreme, what effect reselling has on brands and whether or not reselling is a good example of young entrepreneurship.

Sue believes that a major contributing factor to the desirability of brands like Supreme is the whole process of making the journey into London and camping overnight. This notion, when added to the exclusivity of these brands, makes them vastly more desirable. Here is a segment from my interview with Sue discussing this topic (I would've made it slightly longer but Blogger only let's you upload 30 second videos...).






We then discussed the impact that reselling has on brands and Sue believes that exclusivity is something that these sorts of brands want to achieve, but because of this, reselling has emerged in full force and could carry some real issues. 




Lastly, I wanted to get Sue's expert opinion on the relationship between reselling and young entrepreneurship. I asked if young people skipping school to make some supposedly legitimate money is a good or bad thing and how seriously it can be taken when thought of as entrepreneurial. Sue said: "It's not entrepreneurial, it's opportunistic" and wasn't entirely convinced that it helps in learning about business but did state that it is a good example of being resourceful and the quick and easy cash means it's not hard to see why it's so attractive. For the full segment on this topic, you'll have to listen to the final doc!



Sunday 20 November 2016

My visit to Supreme

At approximately 9pm on Wednesday the 17th of November I took a trip to London to experience a Supreme restock or ‘drop’ for the first time. I wanted to go on a day which guaranteed a large queue  so opted to go on the highly anticipated winter collaboration with The North Face which was bound to draw in a crowd. I arrived in London at around 11pm and stayed with a friend for as long as I could before venturing into Soho on my own.

Supreme, Soho
I arrived at the Supreme store at 5:30am and noticed roughly 60 people dotted around the surrounding streets, but no one directly outside the store. I was then informed by security that Supreme almost faced closure due to noise complaints as a result of hundreds of people mingling around the area in the early hours of the morning and causing disturbances to the local residents. Because of this, security were told to send away anyone who tried to queue before 8am and if those who have been turned away continue to return, they will be banned from visiting the store on that day. I felt slightly like my time had been wasted coming so early but it gave me a chance to see what it was like for people who used to come and spend multiple hours queueing from very early on. 

A cafe next to Supreme
Next door to Supreme was a small cafe that had been open since before I arrived. Despite being 5:30am on a Thursday morning the cafe was filled with people anticipating the Supreme opening and was so busy that in order to sit down you had to buy something; which inevitably led to me buying copious amounts of tea and coffee. The cafe opens early every Thursday morning as no other day in the week provides such rife business and I was told that before the new 'no early queueing'  rule was implemented, the cafe would see large queues throughout the night, similar to Supreme itself. I'd been in the cafe for around an hour when the bouncers came in to remind those who had been in there for a fair while that anyone seen loitering close to the Supreme store would be banned from visiting the store on that day. So I left and wandered around central London for about 10 minutes before realising how cold it was so sought refuge in the nearest McDonalds. I went back over to Supreme just before 8am and was cautious to revisit too early incase they turned me away. As I got outside the store bang on 8 o'clock I was surprised to see no one outside apart from one bouncer. I thought I'd maybe got the time wrong so I disappeared for about half an hour before returning to the same sight. I asked the bouncer what time people were supposed to start queueing and, much to my dismay, he informed me that the queue had started half an hour ago, but on Hopkins Street two roads down from Peter Street (the road Supreme is on). I walked around the corner to witness a the largest queue of people I'd ever seen.

From the back of the Supreme queue, Hopkins Street
         
The queue, which snaked from the start of Hopkins Street (round to the left at the end of the road in the picture above) all the way back to the main road, hosted roughly 500 people (that's a complete guess after a poor attempt at a head count from myself) and was kept in order by 4 or 5 bouncers. At the back of the queue I figured there was no chance that I'd get the opportunity to go inside and buy something for myself but I then discovered that Supreme's 'no early queueing' rule was popular with regular Supreme goers and the bouncers had developed a new system whereby one bouncer would walk down the middle of the road and hand out 'tickets' to random areas in the queue so that everyone had an equal chance of getting in. This encourages people to come later as the chance of you getting a ticket is the same whether you arrive at 5am or 10am. This gave me some hope, however, I soon realised that the people getting 'randomly allocated' the tickets for the store seemed very much like the sort of people you'd imagine come regularly and it soon hit me that the chances of me getting a ticket were quite slim. I overheard someone behind me say "he's handing out gold" referring to the bouncer with the tickets which made sense as the most valuable product in the store on that day would retail for £300 but sell online for £700 meaning, in theory, each ticket handed out is like presenting someone with £400.        


About halfway down the queue on Hopkins Street


One of the things that I noticed while queueing at Supreme is that newcomers tend to stick out like a sore thumb and everyone in the queue, whether you come frequently or not, is in a group or with a couple of friends. This made it quite difficult for me to really engage in the experience as I did feel quite a lot like an outsider being there on my own.

In amongst the crowd as a bouncer begins handing out tickets

Saturday 19 November 2016

‘Hype’ brands and their economic power

In the eyes of most people, clothing is obtained by an individual with the sole purpose of being worn. Granted in some cases, clothes and shoes can be purchased with the intention of collecting – this is particularly popular with trainers, or ‘sneakers’ as they are known in the US. For example, musician and social media phenomenon, DJ Khaled, has a sneaker collection amounting to 10,000 pairs. Not all the shoes are different, but some are one-of-a-kind. He even owns a pair of Nike’s limited edition ‘Air Mags’, the self-lacing shoes that brought Marty McFly’s futuristic hi-tops from Speilberg’s Back to the Future 2 to life. The impressive collection is estimated to be worth over $400,000 although recent auctions for the ‘Air Mags’ have seen the sneaker sell for $200,000, despite their original $10,000 retail value.

But aside from collection, 99% of us would rather spend our money elsewhere and when it comes to clothes, we buy things that we like the look of to wear day to day. Whether you are interested in fashion and spending a sizeable amount of your income on clothes or not, the purpose of the clothes you buy is still the same. However, the emergence of streetwear ‘hype’ brands may change your reasons for buying clothes altogether (a hype brand is simply a clothing or fashion brand that is currently on trend and is highly desirable). Clothing brands such as Supreme, Palace, Jordan’s or Kanye West’s ‘Yeezy’ and ‘Pablo’ merchandise, present an economic opportunity never seen before.
When it comes to valuable clothing, popularity is key – this may seem obvious but let me explain. Supreme, for example, started out as a simple streetwear brand in 1994 New York and was popular among skaters, but that was pretty much it. However, the brand changed forever when, in 2011, hip-hop artist Tyler, The Creator and his group Odd Future (OFWGKTA) began wearing Supreme clothing in their music videos and were regularly seen sporting the brand in posts on social media sites such as Instagram and Twitter. The brand at the time was unknown, fresh and presented the opportunity for fans of Tyler and Odd Future to mimic their idols through their underground clothing. Tyler’s music video for the song ‘She’ featuring Frank Ocean was the first time we had seen the brand on a popular artist. Supreme however, despite the surge in demand for its products, remained true to its core and continued to stock a very limited supply of its items. The exclusivity of Supreme moulded it into a sort of cult, with its fans creating Facebook groups and Reddit threads with the sole purpose of discussing Supreme and buying, selling or trading items. As Supreme’s popularity grew, more recognisable hip/hop and rap artists jumped on the bandwagon, with stars such as Gucci Mane, ASAP Rocky, Drake and even Kanye West seen wearing the brand.

With Supreme products being so difficult to buy, the online market for Supreme blew up. On Websites such as eBay and Depop, Supreme products are sold to the world for incredibly inflated prices. One example can be seen in the inflation of the ‘Box Logo’ hoodie. On the 8th of December 2016, Supreme released new versions of the already existing ‘Box Logo’ hoodie with never seen before colours like peach and olive green  The hoodies retailed in store and online for £150 but were seen selling online later that day – when the shop and website had run out of stock – for £700. The dramatic increase in prices is seen more severely in collaborations, where Supreme will team up with well-known brands such as The North Face, Nike, Air Jordan, Vans, Levi’s and Stone Island (to name a few). When collaborations are released, demand hits an all-time high, as the items released are likely to be one-of-a-kind and may never be stocked in stores again. In a collaboration with The North Face in 2014, Supreme released an expedition jacket that retailed in stores for $338 but is now listed online (if you can find them due to their rarity) for up to $1200. So, if the resell value is so high on these products, how can I buy them for retail price? You might ask. Well, if you want to buy items for retail price you have to either visit the store or the website on the day of a re-stock. Seems easy, right? Wrong.

Purchasing products on the website is near enough impossible as everything sells out in a matter of seconds; with people investing money in computer ‘bots’ (computer programmes that do stuff very quickly for you) to get the goods first. In addition, Supreme has only 10 stores worldwide, with London and Paris hosting the only stores outside of the US and Japan meaning that option 1: visit the shop, is unachievable for many people across the world. If you are lucky enough to live in a Supreme store city then why not pop down at 11 o’clock on Thursday morning when the shop opens after a re-stock and grab yourself a new T-shirt. This is where option 2 might get in your way.

Option 2: you have to queue. On Thursday of every week, Supreme sees queues that are only comparable to that of the queues seen outside Carphone Warehouse when the new iPhone is released for the first time, or outside Game when the new PlayStation debuts on shelves. The queues can last anything from two hours, to 24 hours, with most people prepared to sit on the street outside the store for the majority of Wednesday night, to ensure they get their gear. In April 2014, Supreme was releasing a limited edition sneaker with Nike called the ‘Foamposite’. The crowd attending the store in New York on release day was so large that the NYPD was forced to shut down the opening and send everyone home empty handed. The story seemed so bizarre that it reached international news. Queues like this are seen across all ‘hype’ brands.

Palace opened its first London store in 2015 right around the corner from its skating-turned-fashion counterpart, Supreme. Despite Palace not having quite the same global firepower as Supreme, the same rules apply. The products found in store sell for a relatively reasonable retail price in comparison to the exceptionally large resell value. Palace also enjoy a collaboration every now and then, famously joining forces with Adidas to produce some very limited and very valuable products. Palace, in some ways, rose to stardom off of the back of Supreme’s popularity. It provided an alternative to Supreme that still produced the same sort of underground products to fit the growing skate-wear trend. The same goes for Kanye West’s ‘Pablo’ merchandise that appears once every so often in pop-up shops around the US, generating large queues and seeing all stock sell out on the day of opening.

Unlike the impossible battle on the website, it is possible to purchase Supreme, Palace and Yeezy products from the store, you just have to face the queue. Or do you?

Friday 18 November 2016

Get ready

The next post might be a bit of a long one. As everything for this documentary is completely new to me too, I started writing up a piece that basically was an unloading of everything I had discovered so far in my research and I'm not really sure how to break it up so it's going to be released as one very long post. Brace yourselves.

Wednesday 16 November 2016

Introduction

Hello and welcome to Deadstock a documentary about the new world of reselling. By reselling I mean the process of selling clothes and/or other items, predominantly online that have been previously bought elsewhere. People who resell or 'resellers' use websites such as eBay and Depop to sell-on items as well as direct selling through social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram. My main focus will be on the economic opportunities created by this new phenomenon and how it has impacted on the working life of young people. I will be updating my blog with more information on this topic as well as my experiences with the documentary. Stay tuned.