It’s 8:45am and I just pulled up to my desk on the 10th floor of 55 Water Street with my slicked-back hair, my Alfani suit (yes, ALFANI), my $3.99 Ross Nautica Tie and my Marks & Spencer Hard bottoms. Yes, these are the ones I picked up on my last trip to London for £24.99 - and they already have my feet bumpin’. I gingerly place my coffee on the right side of my desk - about 16 inches away from my keyboard because I know - I KNOW - that if I put it any closer, I might just knock it over and my computer would be toast. I take off my Navy-issued pea coat (that I bought from the nearest Army/Navy Surplus), drape it over the back of my Herman Miller, and take my seat.
With my coffee (actually it’s just hot cocoa with a splash of nescafe) now acting as my comfort, I unfurl the newspaper on the left side of my desk: ‘Morning Call’ - shows me the most interesting items that closed in the market for yesterday. I see some interesting stuff - old faithfuls, new market makers, some incredible highs, some incredible lows, the items people fought for and plenty of randoms. As I’m scanning the report - I sometimes reflexively kick myself for missing something entirely relevant to my cache. Another item I missed out on.
But…regardless of what I participated or didn’t - I find it interesting to see what slipped through the cracks. This is my ‘good morning’ artifact. And I check it regularly. As soon as I’ve internalized the market movers and shakers and have mentally prepared myself for the day - the opening bell rings…
‘Morning Call’ isn’t a finance newspaper or an equities report, it’s what I built to decode the most interesting (public) sneaker market dynamics available to a regular joe like myself: eBay’s completed sales.
A lifetime ago, there were internet forums, and these forums were the only place most of us could find out information about sneakers (online) BEFORE Social Media arrived on the scene. The two biggest ones that I frequented - SoleCollector and NikeTalk - were my daily ‘go-to’s’ before my new go-to’s. And buried deep within NikeTalk was the most fascinating thread I could imagine…a crowdsourced version of what I tried to recreate with Morning Call - programmatically. It was usually titled some version of this: “eBAY auctions won...don’t post live links”. Which, for the uninitiated, means “these are the most interesting ebay auctions that I was paying attention to that ended and if you have any you’d like to share please do it here but also don’t share anything that isn’t yet ended because it might inadvertently raise the price by attracting more attention to something that might currently be flying under the radar” Or something like that.
I loved it. It was definitely one of my top 3 threads. So seeing a totally random sample of what people are into - on a semi-regular basis - showed me that the sneaker world was much bigger than what little we were exposed to.
Because - as any new ‘head might tell you - the first step is remembering the flagship J’s, and then…the field is pretty much widdddde open. But I loved it because sneaker catalogs are deep, and it takes a while to actually build a real taste palate for what it is you’re looking for, and sometimes you don’t even know what you’re looking for until you find it.
StockX’s top 25, or Complex’ top 10, or IG’s ‘sneaker of the year of the week’ is extremely reductive, and so, MorningCall is kinda like my own interest peaking through. Luckily, eBay still exists…and…well…eBay, for all its flaws, is still the purest sneaker marketplace that exists. So what better way to see what’s out and what’s moving and what’s flying under the radar than creating a daily snapshot of what’s going on?
I created MorningCall a couple of months ago, and in that time I’ve learned:
There is a real (serious) collectors community out there for Vintage Reeboks
‘Samples’ only matter if the shoe is popular
‘Player Exclusives’ don’t seem as ‘exclusive’ as they once were
There are more Jordan retro’s than I ever even once thought possible. And if you wait long enough almost every single one can be found for dumb cheap.
Yeezys can be found for less than $10 if you are persistent enough
Kobe’s are still on top when it comes to performance and LeBron’s are still having trouble finding their footing.
There are new typos people are searching for (#IYKYK) to secure steals.
And despite all of that dudes are STILL shilling their own auctions
All that to say…some sneaker truths are universal and some sneaker truths change with time.
I no longer work on Wall Street, but I do mostly work from home…and so after I drop the kids off, put on my house slippers, pull up my chair with my crappy little coffee and take a bite of my burnt toast and my runny eggs, my next favorite thing to do is to crack open a fresh browser to see what ended on eBay…it’s just one of the few things I do that brings me back to just enjoying the hobby for the sake of enjoying it. It allows me to participate in it without hitting that ‘buy’ button. Or even just looking and thinking…’man, I think I know who bought those’ brings me back to reality.
It’s the little things that make the long way around worth it. Give it a shot. Grab your coffee & a bowl of cereal or whatever it is you like to eat for breakfast and take a look with me: Morning Call .