Have you ever had your eye on a limited edition release from your favourite brand? Whether you’re trying to hunt down a collectors’ edition book or limited edition sports merch, one thing remains true – exclusivity and rarity creates demand. The market potential of rarity is no new phenomenon; according to Investopedia, the idea of scarcity increasing economic value dates right back to 1932.

Whereas almost a century ago the most coveted and valuable items in existence were rare stamps and unusual coins, the modern-day version of this concept – and the evolution that technology has brought to it over the years – can be understood perfectly through the trainer market. 

Luxury goods and sportswear have long been the most successful segments in the wider apparel, luxury, and fashion sector, and the global trainers market has been forecast to be worth over $100 billion by 2026. Demand for these items is high, however this recent surge is simply a result of scarcity and inaccessibility. 

Over the last decade, access to popular trainer models and silhouettes has become increasingly difficult. Even before the pandemic, brands were beginning to move away from in-person drops (which had their own accessibility issues that precipitated unfairness in the market), towards online raffles and lotteries.

Retailers have hyped up launches of rare trainers since the birth of the subculture in 1985, almost 40 years ago, with the debut of the Air Jordan 1. The 1990s and 2000s saw limited edition shoes spawning long queues outside stores as collectors eagerly waited in line to purchase the newest releases of rare and popular trainers. But in 2023 loyal customers wait in both physical and digital lines, only to find stock gone moments after the shoes were released. When did buying a pair of trainers become so difficult? 

Trainer giants, including Nike, are trying to fix this problem themselves. But attempts to make access to trainers fairer, such as releases through raffles and apps, have not solved the issues of exclusivity; the use of bots to buy up stock is rampant, with some trainer releases seeing 97% of traffic coming from bots. This means that going online and trying to purchase a specific pair of trainers is in many cases becoming an increasingly impossible process, with no way of buying directly from the manufacturer or major stockists outside of raffles. 

Earlier this year Nike dropped some of the rarest, and therefore most sought after, trainers of 2023 – the recent Travis Scott x Air Jordan 1 Low OG ‘Olive’ and the recent Lost And Found AJ1 restock. The problem? Of millions of entries to the raffles for these releases, almost half of them were bots. It goes without saying that in sitting amongst the most sought after items, trainers are a huge target for scalpers.

With the advance of technologies and social media, the trend of buying rare trainers has also evolved into a ‘cool’ and profitable hobby, with high profile collaborations with luxury brands such as Tiffany & Co and Louis Vuitton providing trainers with a sense of prestige that only exacerbates their scarcity value.

Alongside this, increased digitisation of releases has made it easier and easier for scalpers to automate checkout softwares (i.e. create bots), check out quickly and nab the newest drops before anyone else. This is a problem – whether it be with Taylor Swift tickets or the Nike Lost And Found Jordan 1s – that digitisation has caused across the ecommerce space, but especially with luxury wear and collectibles. Trainers don’t sing, dance, and tour the globe, but the process of acquiring the most sought-after shoes is just as painful a battle as spending hours in a Ticketmaster queue for tickets. The situations are the same – bots are gatekeeping goods from real fans for profit. This is a problem impacting everyone from trainerheads to Swifties.

So what’s the solution? At Laced, we are fighting the problem with the same means that caused it; developing technology. Our platform democratises access to rare trainers and luxury goods by connecting buyers and sellers of these products through an easy-to-use anonymous marketplace, allowing for the simple shopping experience one has come to expect from the internet for even the most sought after products. Providing a secure, transparent, and easy-to-use service for collectors and enthusiasts, our platform offers authentication of goods, same-day order processing, seven-day-a-week deliveries, and same-day-as-sale payouts as standard.

But it’s no good getting your hands on a rare set of Jordans, simply to find later down the line that you’ve wasted your money on a knockoff pair. Forbes named counterfeiting the tenth largest economy last year, and knockoff trainers are taking up a key slice of the action.

To ensure the authenticity of every pair sold, we have a dedicated team of in-house authenticators that thoroughly check every pair before they are sent to the buyer. Our authentication process was developed by Matt Miller, our Head of Authentication Operations, and one of the most respected individuals in the trainer space. We make sure that every product that passes through our warehouse is checked to the highest standards, leaving no one empty handed or let-down.

Our fully cloud native tech stack is built in-house to support our process. The tech we’ve produced leverages third parties where we have low desire to innovate, and values simplicity in the areas we do. Our passion to provide everyone with access to their favourite goods shapes the approach to how we work together. How we bring our problem solvers and subject matter experts together to solve the key problems facing our customers is just as important as our tech stack itself in democratising access to the rarest trainers and solving the bot problem. We’d be nothing without our team.

We want to push the point that you don’t have to be sneaky to buy trainers. It shouldn’t be a long, laborious process of raffle after raffle to get a pair of shoes. The digital revolution has changed so much for the better, opening access to knowledge and culture in a way that the world has never seen. We’re now opening up access to trainers in the same way and placing them in the hands of anyone and everyone who wants them.