Are you familiar at all with the sneaker resale market?
No? Cool, let me tell you about it.
I was really into basketball in the seventh grade (circa 2014). Through that interest, I found a hobby in collecting sneakers. Not just any sneakers though. These are limited edition, rare basketball shoes designed for top players like Michael Jordan, LeBron James, and Kevin Durant (these were actually the specific ones that got me into it).
Little did I know at the time, but soon did I come to realize, that this is a very expensive hobby to have. So, I turned to reselling as a way to subsidize it. As I continued through middle school, high school, and college, the resale market continued to grow rapidly… and so did my side hustle. By my freshman year in college, I was grossing a little over $300,000/year just by reselling shoes out of my dorm room. However, the growth in my business started to plateau.
The secondary market for sneakers, which is now valued at $6.2 billion globally, grew so fast that technology and outside investment couldn’t keep up with it, leaving resellers like myself scrambling to piece together outdated and inefficient tools to run our businesses. For example, the current standard in the industry is for individual resellers to manage their inventory (1-500) all from a spreadsheet. This doesn’t sound too bad until you consider that each of those items will then have half a dozen individual listings stemming from them, because all of the current investment in the industry is just going to building more marketplace platforms. So, in order for resellers to keep up with customer preferences, they have to list their inventory across more and more marketplaces, leading to more strain on resources and perpetuating their disorganization.
I felt this pain for years and saw firsthand how it was limiting my business’s potential, which is why we built Copyt – to automate individual resellers’ inventory management and cross-platform listing. Soon after we completed our individual platform, we heard from stores (Consignment and Buy-Sell-Trade boutiques) all across the continent that they were experiencing the same issues but on a much larger scale. Rather than trying to manage a couple of hundred items and list them to a half dozen marketplaces, they were struggling to manage thousands of items and list them just across their in-store POS system and website. On top of that, the stores that were running consignment were being forced to manage intake and payouts of items all on pen and paper… or more spreadsheets.
The reason these stores and other larger resellers can’t turn to any basic IMS or omnichannel listing tool is that every sneaker can be very similar (same size and SKU) all need to be tracked individually because they can have different box conditions, item conditions, buy prices, sell prices, and consignor it belongs to. Therefore, it is not as easy as saying “I have 4 size 9 Nike Dunk Low Pandas.” Rather, you need to know “I have 4 size 9 Pandas with one that is a 9/10 condition that I paid $100 for, one that is brand new with a perfect box and buy price of $130, one that is brand new with a damaged box and a buy price of $120, and another that is brand new with a perfect box and is consigned.”
So we built a platform to address all of these issues. Our Copyt Enterprise platform enables stores to manage all of their unique inventory, list, and sync across all of their platforms (Shopify, Clover, Square, and eBay), efficiently audit inventory, and manage consignment intake and payouts (by leveraging our Copyt Individual platform as a consignor portal) all from one spot. Plus, we have built out a complete database of sneakers so that rather than needing to manually type out all item details each time a seller goes to make a single listing, they can log a new item and have it listed everywhere in just 15 seconds.
I am beyond grateful to be building great solutions for a community that I love deeply and that played such a major role in shaping me. With that being said, our vision with Copyt is to enable any reseller to create a livelihood from their passion.
