With the help of Josh Luber, founder of Campless, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight site takes a look at sneaker resellers and whether Nike could actually capture a portion of the estimated $240 million resell market. You can read the full article here.
The best part of the story is how it focuses on Luber and why he founded Campless:
Luber’s obsession is what compels him to stay up until 3 a.m. most nights — outside his full-time job as a strategy consultant at IBM — collecting data on sneakers. Using eBay’s public API, he can crunch the sales numbers in spreadsheets and learn all sorts of things about the secondary sneaker market. With sneakerheads on Instagram stoking consumer desire, Luber says it’s the perfect moment for him. “So the timing worked out really well,” he said. “My obsession with sneakers and obsession with data were growing at the same time.”
You also learn some great info like how Luber displays his shoes at home and how he removes fakes from the Campless database. For those of us now working in the business world, Campless has been a great addition to the sneaker blog scene. Someone focusing on the actual business of sneakers and backing up all their hypotheses with numbers. It’s people like Josh who will help take sneaker blogging from hype and PR to true journalism.
Read FiveThirtyEight’s feature here and let me know what you think in the comments.
