(4/12) In January of 2014, I started thinking about sneaker grading and the business that would come to be known as The Sneaker Savant. Because it’s like a completely different business model and a hy

(4/12) In January of 2014, I started thinking about sneaker grading and the business that would come to be known as The Sneaker Savant. Because it’s like a completely different business model and a hybrid of the real world/tech, it’s been difficult trying to find a traditional business path. I’ve gone through *several iterations of it and *several different versions of how I thought it should go and, for a long time I was afraid to approach anyone with a half-baked idea. ⁣
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Several times I hit a point where I felt I didn’t know where else to turn, and several times I went back to the drawing board. One time I went out and ordered $5k worth of goods from China and thought I was well on my way to becoming The Sneaker Savant millionaire, and when the goods got here I had them tested ( @joerdan23tn_kooth ) and realized they were straight up trash - I just took them straight to the dumpster. It was brutal. Might as well have used the $5k for toilet paper it woulda went further.⁣
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So in 2016, a couple of years after we first talked on the phone, I wanted to share my idea with Jaysse to see what he thought about it...maybe help me figure out where to go with it. I started the conversation over text: ‘I know you’re a @nyknicks fan - who you got - Allen Houston or Amare Stoudemire?’ Jay responded with ‘Houston’. At the time, I was sitting on two Knicks PEs - a pair of H20 Huarache 2k5’s and a pair of Amare whateverthehells. I took the pair of H20s, graded them, packaged them and sent them over to @urban_necessities with Jay’s name on the top. Jay had no idea what I was sending or why I was asking or anything. ⁣
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A couple of days passed...I remember I was in my living room watching The Office on @netflix and then...I got the call from Jaysse. ‘Yo man, what is this?’⁣