Thing #1: I got a call in early March 2025 from a this dude I met through Ramin, who HE met through Josh. He’s a venture capitalist and I’ve been helping him develop a sneaker app, so we’ve been in contact for a while…he hits me up and says ‘yo, we’re going to StockX in Jersey - you in?”‘
Being that I’ve never been to StockX, I figured this would be the only opportunity I’d ever have. So. Um. Hell yeah. He buys my tickets and before I know it, I’m touching down after a red eye in Newark. Within 2 hours - not even a shower - I’m meeting their head of brand protection and getting a tour of their warehouse and facility. It is…*enormous*. I have *never* seen anything like this up close.
The Jersey trip was kind of a big deal for me. It was my first ‘sneaker-related trip’ since the beginning of the pandemic, and I wanted to make the most of it. I figured if I were going all the way to New Jersey (from California), I might as well try to hit another couple of spots I wanted to hit - I figure I’ll hit up Zak Kurtz at Sneaker Legal (Jersey City) and Sean Williams at Solecial Studies (Brooklyn) and I make a trip of it.
For the first two days - I meet with the head of Brand Protection - this super interesting dude with a long history of working at Nike and Converse and New Balance. He’s walking me around explaining the workflows and - although I wouldn’t say I’m shocked - I’m pretty shocked. RFID scanners and conveyor belts and boxes and more boxes and labels and black lights and scanners and this and that and…my head is spinning. This dude is on another level, but I can keep up…I am *picking* this dudes brain for hours…and we are connecting over the most ridiculous of topics: Things like authentication by olfactory detectors and authentication by percussion and global positioning systems localized through UPC showing up in different parts of the world This dude was interesting as all hell, but I got the feeling that he was marching to the beat of his own drum. If there was an episode of CSI having to do with sneaker bootleggers - this was the dude that would crack the case.
That night, I ate one of the best steaks I’ve ever had in my life, and the next morning I was back to see if I could find places we could collaborate with the app we built. He left me alone to my devices and I mostly just poked around and tried to make sense of the factory. I got lost a few times, made a whole bunch of connections in my head, looked at assload of sneakers, talked with a bunch of employees, and saw their process of dealing with fakes…
I spent a couple of days at their facility before accepting the fact that this dude Josh built a multi-billion dollar company with hundreds (if not thousands) of employees pushing literally tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of pairs of shoes around the world. Fascinating. And I was *right there.*
I flew home thinking about how surreal it all was — how something that started with message boards, campouts, and a few boxes in a trunk had turned into this massive, humming organism of scanners, belts, and data. The same culture that once felt underground was now industrialized, optimized, globalized — and yet, somehow, still full of humans moving it all around.
The Jersey trip reminded me that authenticity isn’t just about whether a shoe is real or fake anymore. It’s about whether the people behind it still care — whether we still care. I won’t speak for everyone I met at the facility, but there were far more people I met that looked at it more as a paycheck than anything…and that’s where I keep finding myself…
I kinda thought that was the end…the end of the ‘JT & StockX saga’, but I waited a few months and another thing ended up happening.
Thing #2 coming soon.