By Ko Dong-hwan
Pitching tents hours before the opening of Nike stores so as to be the first to get inside, customers sprinted into the stores like a mad mob. A witness to the scene at Shinsegae Department Store in Daegu said it was "scary to see them running like zombies."
The commotion happened on Jan. 14, when Nike's Air Jordan 1 Low G sneakers landed at some 30 Nike stores nationwide in limited quantities. The shoes sold for 179,000 won a pair.
Shinsegae Department Store Daegu stocked 100 pairs of the shoes, while other stores also only carried a limited number. All on the same day, members of an online community of sneaker lovers called, "Nike Mania," shared news of having witnessed people getting into fights in front of stores in Daegu or Yeongdeungpo District in Seoul, running inside a store in the city of Uijeongbu and the shoes being sold-out from a store in Ilsandong District.
While some may have just liked the shoes and bought a pair purely for themselves, the Michael Jordan sneakers were also being bought for another purpose: so that customers could later resell the shoes for much higher prices.
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| Air Jordan 1 Low G golf shoes / Screenshot from Nike website |
On various online resell platforms in Korea, Nike's line of golf shoes tagged with the Jordan logo have been gaining unprecedented attention. Some 240 Jordan 1 Low G pairs of sneakers were sold on Kream, the biggest online resale platform in the country, only three hours after they were put on store shelves, for an average of 634,000 won per pair.
One pair sold for 800,000 won ― the most expensive offer placed on the shoes. The Jordan 1 Retro Golf Cleat Chicago, which rolled out in 2017, has recently been sold for over 2 million won on the market, while Jordan 1 Retro High Off-White Chicago was sold for 50 times its original price of 226,000 won. The Kwondo1, a collaboration between Nike and K-pop artist G-Dragon, has also been traded for three times its original price of 219,000 won on resale markets.
Because of such high demand and despite the high prices, the sneaker craze has attracted more people to become sneaker sellers. Likewise, the increasing popularity of playing golf since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic has also driven more people to seek out the shoes. Amid these conditions, Nike's golf shoe line has created a feedback loop for both suppliers and consumers.
The trend runs parallel to Nike's record sales in 2020-21, when it jumped 12.3 percent from the previous year, to 1.45 trillion won ($12 billion), beating Japan's Uniqlo, which had recorded 1.37 trillion won in 2018-19, according to reports. No other fashion brands in Korea reached such sale figures during 2020-21.
Nike also boomed worldwide last year, showing a 19-percent increase from last year to record $44.5 billion.
Marketing experts explained that the strong storytelling behind the Jordan brand has allowed it to do well even during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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