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Bloomberg Businessweek March 1, 2021speculator came in January 2020. He’d just dropped out of
the University of Oregon midway through his second term
and moved back to Portland. There, he said, he tracked down
a man he’d heard about who’d stumbled across an excep-
tional find in an abandoned storage unit: four pairs of Nike
Mags, the futuristic self-lacing shoes worn by Michael J. Fox
in 1989’s Back to the Future Part II. Hebert described finding
the man and paying $22,000 for the collection, then flipping
it for $42,000.
The proceeds went toward a play for a bigger and potentially
more lucrative slice of the market: bricks. These shoes, whose
nickname evokes both a badly missed shot in basketball and
the way they cling, as if weighed down, to store shelves, tend
to be less loved than Mags, but they’re much easier to get hold
of. In today’s $60 billion global sneaker market, some releases
inevitably fail to sell as projected. Whether the cause is over-
manufacturing, under promotion, or a failure to anticipate
trends, the result tends to be the same: a markdown. When
that happens, resellers have their bots snap them up in bulk,
often before ordinary consumers notice they’re on sale. In
many cases, they’ll use discount codes bought via social media,
earning an additional 10% to 40% off orders worth tens or even
hundreds of thousands of dollars. On the secondary market,
the shoes can reliably earn from 10% to 30% more than the sale
price—leading some bricks, paradoxically, to end up reselling
for their full retail price or more.“I’ll give you an example,” Hebert told me. “The Nike
VaporMax is considered a brick shoe, because it’s not a hyped
Jordan that resells for 50 or a hundred bucks over retail. It
usually gets discounted.” But someone, somewhere always
seems to want a pair, he said. And since resellers don’t need
to worry about clearing out seasonal stock or meeting quar-
terly sales targets, they can sell the shoe whenever it’s prof-
itable to do so.
Before the pandemic-era sneaker surge, Hebert was selling
enough bricks to clear $200,000 in revenue most months.
They’re a volume business, though, so he’d had to start
renting the warehouse in Eugene, which is big enough to
accommodate two fire engines. The space became both a
hangout spot and the setting for an endless well of Instagram
posts designed to make sneakerheads drool.
Eventually, Hebert realized that his growing Instagram
following included hundreds of entrepreneurial teens
hoping to emulate his success, which led him to a new rev-
enue stream. For $250 per month, they could subscribe to
a Discord group, West Bricks, where he shared information
on upcoming online releases, such as what sneakers would
be discounted, when and where the sale would begin, and
how many the retailer would have. As of late 2020, Hebert
counted about 450 subscribers. One of the first to sign up was
a 17-year-old Californian, who told me West Bricks had made
him more than six figures. He described his primary market
as middle men who would resell the shoes in China—where
customers offered top dollar to avoid buying counterfeits—
and who would sometimes pay him in rubber-banded stacks
of cash that he’d later flaunt on Instagram.
Hebert’s competitors have access to the same bot soft-
ware and StockX-borne real-time market research as he does.
What they don’t have, according to some of his subscribers,
is consistent, sound analysis of what shoes to buy, how to get
them, and, crucially, how long resellers might expect demand
to persist. Hebert declined to talk about his sources of infor-
mation, but he did say he was lucky to have grown up in
Portland, where both Nike and Adidas base their U.S. oper-
ations. “If you know the right people here, this is the city to
sell shoes,” he said. The right people “can give you access to
stuff that, like, a normal person would not have access to.”W
hen the Covid boom got under way last year,
Hebert found himself confronting the unex-
pected problem of having more customers
than ever but no way of getting his hands on
more kicks. For inspiration, he looked to Nike co-founder Phil
Knight, who got his start selling another company’s shoes out
of the trunk of his car. Like Knight, Hebert would hit the road.
The stock he needed was out there, he knew, languishing in
backrooms at the retail outlets fearful American shoppers were
avoiding. So he grabbed a pal, bought a 17-foot Ford E-350 box
truck at auction, and embarked on a 25-day, 10,000-mile brick
hunt. Hebert’s traveling companion was Justin Taliaferro, a
friend from high school. The trip “seemed like exactly what we SCREENSHOT OF VIDEO PROVIDED BY JOE HEBERT