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The Sneaker resale market has recently received a projected valuation of $6 Billion by the year 2025, and one of its newest contributors, London based start-up Laced are looking to upset the status quo, and insert themselves in the narrative by cultivating the lucrative but undervalued European market. Raising a $1 Million investment from London based VC Talis Capital, Laced have been able to, in just over a year of existence, upset the apple cart and emerge as a fresh faced competitor in the upper echelons of the secondary footwear market.
Since the platform’s inception every aspect of their model has trended upwards steadily in the right direction. Number of customers; both buying and selling products. Customer interaction and engagement via social media, and readership of their accompanying blog. Everything for Laced is seemingly heading in the right direction. From its inception, Laced was created to challenge what they believed to be a failing by other platforms in their native Europe. Customers just weren’t getting their products quick enough, and for Laced they felt like it was a problem they could most definitely have a go at addressing.
One of the keys to being successful in the secondary market ultimately relies on speed. As soon as you accept sneakers as a tradeable commodity to start to think of their values as a fluid concept. What this essentially means is that what they are worth today isn’t necessarily going to be what they are worth tomorrow, in much the same way you think about stocks. A principle that independent resellers are all too familiar with. Ultimately confirming the importance of the speed of transaction.
Getting the product from seller to buyer quickly is one of the building blocks of success that Laced have modelled their business on. Limited stock sneakers usually follow a pretty established trend; they go on sale, they sell out at retailers, and then they begin to appear on the secondary markets, initially with the money they can fetch being very much inflated because the ‘hype’ surrounding them is significant. The longer a customer has to wait to have them made available to them, the less likely they are to fetch the more mouth watering markups.
So now you understand the theory, this is where Laced have put it into practice pretty successfully so far. They say, where their competitors are making you wait a week, Laced can move the products from seller to site to buyer in a matter of days. What this means for their model, is that the individuals looking to make money are making more money, and those who are looking for a product get it quicker. Everyone is winning. Coupled with what they describe as an unbreakable bond with the culture, and the customers that help make it what it is, Laced are arguably the most knowledgeable and influential platform in the resale market that you might not have heard of yet.
Release ID: 88952178