Discover StockX with Josh Luber

During the official launch of StockX's first European authentication center a few months ago, we had the opportunity to interview Josh Luber, the founder of the famous platform. Driven by the curiosity to understand how one of the most interesting realities in the world of sneakers was born, Josh shared with us his love story with sneakers and what were the challenges he had to face in these years. 

#1 How was your passion for sneakers born and what was the first Jordan (because I know it was definitely a Jordan) that made you lose your mind?

I collected sneakers all my life, I have the exact same stories every other 40yrs old sneakerhead and American has, which is just growing up playing basketball when Jordan played. I wanted Jordan’s, my mother never bought me Jordan’s, so as soon as I had money I bought Jordan’s. For me, the first one that just made me totally turned my head was probably in 1991 and it was the Jordan 5 Grape. But it wasn’t until like 6 years later that I finally got my first pair which was the Jordan 11 Concord, which was a year after I started working at my first job so I had my first check.

I went into the mall and the Jordan 11 Concord had come out a couple of months ago and the shoe had been on the shelf for a little while, it didn’t sell out immediately. I walked into the store and there’s a pair of Jordan 11 Concord sitting on the shelf and I was like ‘Those’. Two guys working at the store looked at each other and then looked at me, and they go “well there’s one pair left and we are gonna selling it on eBay” and I was "No, no, no. I’m taking that". It turned out I ultimately got the shoe and I would play basketball with it for the next two years and I still have it and it looks like I played basketball in it for two years.

#2 At what point did you realize that your passion could become your job? 

For me growing up in high school in the mid-90s and college in the late 90s, the word entrepreneurship did not exist. I unintentionally tried to avoid working in sneakers. I worked at three other places before StockX and none of them had anything to do with sneakers. So I was almost unintentionally trying to separate passion from sneakers from my work. I took a corporate job and I went to work at IBM, which I would never think I would do but if you’re a startup guy you go working at a big company like IBM the first thing you do is you start working on things on the side and so at that point as a side project I decided to do something related to sneakers. I guess it was somewhat serendipitous that in the props of it my most successful startup was the one that finally blended my personal passions and business passions.

#3 What were the most difficult challenges and the greatest satisfactions you have faced and achieved in these years?

Just learning how to be an entrepreneur, learning how to be a startupper, learning how to deal with that kind of highs and lows. I played basketball all my life and one of the really early lessons that my father taught me when I was a young kid -that always stuck in my head- was never get too high when you win and never get too low when you lose, because you’re gonna lose a lot and you’re gonna win a lot, or also to stay even. And I feel that that’s a sort of rule for being an entrepreneur: the swings in one day, the feeling that you’re on top of the world, that you’re about to create the next Google, and the next thing it’s just a complete failure, everything is just a complete mess. And so those level swings, you have to learn how to deal with them, because this is the 4th startup, you can’t use what you’ve learned until the next one. It’s when you go through these things that you learn that you can’t really apply well until the next one so that’s probably why a lot of entrepreneurs don’t succeed until they’ve been through it a couple of times.

#4 In just two years, StockX has become the reference point for sneakerheads, resellers, or simple random buyers: there is no user in the world now, that before selling the latest sneakers won in a raffle, doesn't check the current market value on StockX. Could you imagine that StockX would have become so successful in the world, considering the diversity of European markets compared to the US?

I appreciate the assessment that everyone is using StockX to check prices, that has always been the goal since the beginning. The business that was the precursor to this, Campless, was a price guide and that’s exactly what we were. So that was always the goal. Obviously, that rapid growth has been amazing and we could have never predicted to become a billionaire company in just two and a half years. But the idea, the apotheosis, was completely logical cause we didn’t make this up, the stock market has been the most efficient form of market for years, and all we did was moving it from certain commodities, stocks, and bonds, to other commodities, sneakers, streetwear, watches, handbags. So the logic was that it was a better way to buy or sell anything, a better way to understand market value, a better way to have access to certain products and commodities, that were harder to access before. That logic was sound, it was one of those things where I was like "Man why no one thought of this before?". The execution was the only thing that matters, but the idea that this was going to be better, is based on hundreds of years of proof in the stock market. 

#5 Do you miss the times when to find a sneaker you had to start asking for information about the release months before and venturing into the stores? Do you think that with the advent of the internet a bit of magic and the charm of discovery have gone lost?

It’s a great question because it's one of the big debates, one of the big points of discussion that we see a lot in the sneaker community. There was a community around the sneaker store, you could walk into a store and you could find something that you didn’t know existed. Wherever I travel the first thing I do is going to sneakers store and try to find something that I couldn’t find elsewhere. That still exists in other forms, that just doesn’t exist in sneakers as much. But the community still exists, it just moved. 

Fourteen years old kids would always create a community around things that they like. And so today, rather than those kids sitting outside sneaker stores and hanging out there, the community go to Sneakerness, go to Sneakercon, go to one of these sneakers shows, and you see all these kids together who all know each other, they go to school and sell and trade shoes. They’re all online communities. Saying that the internet sort of destroyed community would take all the positive of the internet. Having access to transparency is what the internet has also done. You’ve seen 3 really big jumps in sneakers world of that has changed. The 1st was in 1999/2000 with eBay, 2nd in 2001/2012 with Instagram. Now all sneakerheads can see what other people wearing, and then show off their sneakers. The 3rd, StockX, is adding that layer of transparency to the actual buying process in terms of authentication, data, standardization.

#6 Where do you see StockX and the entire sneaker market in 5 years? Do you prospect a continuous growth in the current sense or do you believe that something can change drastically?

The resell sneaker market today is still just a baby. It is supposed to become way-way bigger and the reason why is that really happens is not much about the resell market getting bigger as it is the primary and secondary market converging and becoming one market. So today in the United States the resell market is about 1.5/2 billion, globally it’s somewhere between 5/6 billion, in the UK alone is over 200000£ but that’s just the resell market. The retail sneaker market -the primary market- is over 90 billion globally. So there what happens is that those people, not all of them, but some part of those people, who are today buying sneakers in retail are getting them at Nike.com or JD Sports or Foot Locker and they walk in and they can buy any of 200 pairs of sneakers that are on the wall. But if you go to StockX there are more than 30k pairs of sneakers that you can buy, and so these customers that never in a million years would have tried to wave through eBay, or Instagram or Facebook, 3 or 4 years ago, buy a pair of Jordans or a pair of Yeezy.

But today StockX has created a marketplace that is standardized, that is authentic, it’s easy, it’s about access, making it easy for those people to buy products they would have never had access to before. What happens is we start to blur those lines between what is primary and what is secondary because the customers cross over. The customer no longer cares whether it’s primary or secondary, they just want a pair of sneakers. And that’s exactly what the stock market is: it’s a single marketplace that brings together primary and secondary markets in one place. So it’s bringing the primary and secondary market together and that’s what we’re trying to do for consumer goods, starting with sneakers and streetwear, watches and handbags as if you have one market. In the next five years, it will look like the resell market grows because there are more people participating in it but it’s really the same market where primary and secondary markets converge.