{"id":381748,"date":"2014-05-22T11:50:20","date_gmt":"2014-05-22T16:50:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.snkrsday.com\/?p=381748"},"modified":"2019-01-02T14:04:23","modified_gmt":"2019-01-02T19:04:23","slug":"opinion-matt-powell-punks-sneakerheads-he-should-be-thanking-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.snkrsday.com\/opinion-matt-powell-punks-sneakerheads-he-should-be-thanking-them\/","title":{"rendered":"Opinion: Matt Powell Punks Sneakerheads. He Should Be Thanking Them."},"content":{"rendered":"<table width=\"450\" align=\"center\">\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td>Nate Jaffee has been a sneaker aficionado for his entire life and spent much of his career in marketing and strategy positions in the sneaker industry. He started in Sports Marketing at &#8220;the original&#8221; AND 1 and most recently, he was Director of Strategy at PUMA. Currently, Nate lives in Austin, TX and works at social media startup <a title=\"Mass Relevance\" href=\"http:\/\/www.massrelevance.com\" target=\"_blank\">Mass Relevance<\/a>.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<p>With sneaker sales at an all-time high and the mainstream media cranking out stories about sneakerheads, the sneaker industry seems to have its own version of Darren Rovell. His name is Matt Powell. He is the guy that The Wall Street Journal or\u00a0<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">ESPN.com<\/span>\u00a0goes to for an authoritative quote when they&#8217;re writing about the sneaker business. Forbes Magazine hired Powell last year to write a column called \u201cSneakernomics.\u201d But Powell waded into water that is over his head in his most recent column,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/mattpowell\/2014\/05\/21\/sneakernomics-are-sneakerheads-important\/\" target=\"_blank\">\u201cSneakernomics: Are Sneakerheads Important?\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Powell&#8217;s answer to this question is a polite but stubborn &#8220;no&#8221;.\u00a0Conveniently forgetting that the prominence of sneakerheads today is the reason why Forbes hired him in the first place, he turns his nose up to the community, dismissing its financial impact on the industry as &#8220;minor&#8221; and downplaying its cultural influence outside \u201cthe echo chamber that is sneaker culture.\u201d His view of sneakerheads is so out of touch and misinformed, I felt the need to set the record straight:<\/p>\n<p> 1) His claim that Sneakerheads have a \u201cminor impact\u201d on industry sales is BS. He says Sneakerheads account for only 5% of industry sales. But he fails to mention that virtually all of the $18B industry\u2019s growth in 2013 came from sneakerheads. Based on SportsOneSource data (the same that Powell uses), the \u201cfashion basketball\u201d sub-category, where the average price is above $100, reached $3.6B in sales in 2013 &#8212; an increase of 27% versus 2012. If you take away the ~$600M in growth generated by that high-end basketball segment, footwear industry growth as a whole goes from around 4% to around 1%.\u00a0It would be crazy to call that a minor impact. Mark Parker would get hell from Wall Street if you took away the increased profits generated from Nike\u2019s high end basketball sales in 2013. I don&#8217;t care how you define &#8220;sneakerhead&#8221; &#8212; there is no growth in the athletic footwear category without them.  2) Powell doesn\u2019t get the importance of influence or trends on sneaker sales. Sneakerheads didn\u2019t buy every one of of those $100+ Nike basketball sneakers. In fact, they probably wouldn&#8217;t be caught dead in some of them. But starting with pricing, sneakerheads have a profound impact on how Nike merchandises its footwear collections these days. Sneakerheads\u2019 insatiable appetite for \u201cheat\u201d means prices for signature products like the LeBron XIs or KD VIs and every retro Jordan reach the $200+ range. Setting such a high price allows Nike to raise prices across the collection, because suddenly $140 doesn\u2019t seem so crazy when the new LeBrons are $250. That, in turn, increases profits, encourages retailers to offer more high priced sneakers and suddenly even non-sneakerheads get used to spending $140 for sneakers that will never touch a basketball court.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s the influence that sneakerheads wield on the market.  Sneakerheads wield a similarly large cultural influence when it comes to trends.\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/mattpowell\/2014\/04\/21\/62\/\" target=\"_blank\">Powell himself has cited the shift\u00a0<\/a>towards premium athletic styles as a major trend that&#8217;s hurting teen retailers like Abercrombie &amp; Fitch and Aeropostale. Who does he think made it cool to rock expensive kicks on all occasions?<\/p>\n<p>Sneakerheads have also infiltrated pop culture. One day it\u2019s adidas making a major investment in sneaker icon Kanye West. The next, it&#8217;s 106 and Park host (and\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/sneakernews.com\/2011\/05\/02\/collections-terrence-j-shows-off-his-sneaker-dressing-room\/\" target=\"_blank\">known sneaker freak<\/a>) Terrance J getting hired as the anchor of E! News. Even Mindy Kaling wrote sneakerheads into a storyline in\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.hulu.com\/watch\/581957\" target=\"_blank\">an\u00a0episode of Fox\u2019s The Mindy Project<\/a>\u00a0this season. All of this is part of sneakerheads&#8217; move from the margins (and their parents&#8217; basement) into the mainstream, where they&#8217;re arbiters of cool. A pattern that Powell seems to have missed.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">3)\u00a0\u00a0Powell ends with a cheap parting shot aimed at sneakerhead media outlets. Referring to their fear of offending the brands they depend on, he writes, \u201cBecause the sneakerhead media is unwilling or unable to speak the truth to power, their influence is very limited.\u201d He\u2019s comparing apples and oranges. Snkrs Day was never created to stake out positions the way The Atlantic does. Maybe Powell has missed the out on the rise of internet-based media companies like Gawker, Mashable, or anyone dedicated to a product category &#8211; whether that is video games, skateboarding, Apple products, guns or fashion. Media outlets are in the business of creating content that feeds their audience\u2019s obsession with a set of people, products and issues \u2026 and then connecting advertisers who are interested in those audiences.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">Matt Powell may be an expert in retail sales numbers and market share, but he\u2019s tragically out of step with the culture that drives the business.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nate Jaffee has been a sneaker aficionado for his entire life and spent much of his career in marketing and&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4667,"featured_media":381771,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1218760],"tags":[1225884],"cultivate_rss":[],"class_list":{"2":"type-post"},"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v24.0 (Yoast SEO v24.0) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Opinion: Matt Powell Punks Sneakerheads. 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