A few months after launch, Sen had the idea to, on Black Friday, sell some of the year’s most coveted shoes at retail price. People sometimes buy hard-to-get sneakers only to resell them at dramatic markups. Soon the business was growing too quickly. To make it look like the shoes came from many sellers, they went to The Home Depot, came back with a variety of individual floor tiles, and photographed the shoes on them. They bought some pairs of shoes and put them on the marketplace. The team needed to attract sellers despite having few buyers, and buyers despite having few sellers. Since its launch, in July of 2015, it has become a mecca for fashion and culture, with 30 million users, 100,000 different products, 2 million listings, and a host of editorial and interactive content. That night, we bought our web domain name, and we started building our game plan.” That was the origin of their current company, GOAT-short for greatest of all time, a reference to Jordan-and an app aimed at selling new and vintage sneakers. There was an app for everything, and it just shocked us that no one had figured out authentication for sneakers yet. “I remember the moment,” says Sen Sugano, Daishin’s younger brother, who’d joined GrubWithUs when they were in Chicago.
When he opened the box, he knew something wasn’t right. In 2013, Nike rereleased the Grapes, after 23 years, and in 2014 Sugano ordered a pair on eBay. That night, we bought our web domain name, and we started building our game plan." - Sen Sugano, Chief Brand Officer at GOAT Group They pivoted a few times but the business never found its footing.
#SNEAKER MORE THAN JUST THE TWO OF US SERIES#
Sugano and Lu moved to Los Angeles, where they’d both grown up, and raised a $6 million Series A for the app. They moved to Chicago to more actively manage one franchise but didn’t know anyone in the city, so they started a social dining app called GrubWithUs. Eventually they started writing iPhone apps, then founded an import/export business, and meanwhile bought Creampuff franchises for passive income. The two held corporate jobs for a while, but didn’t feel fulfilled - they quit on the same day. They bonded over their love of sneakers and roomed together after college. Sugano went on to study Political Economy at Berkeley, where he met Eddy Lu on a basketball court. The purchase would later change his life, and the sneaker industry. Sugano, a basketball and sneaker enthusiast, had to have them, and his dad bought them for him. Michael Jordan wore them on a Wheaties box, and Will Smith wore them on The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. In 1990, when Daishin Sugano was ten years old, Nike debuted a pair of shoes called the Air Jordan 5 Grapes, named so because of its purple highlights.
0 kommentar(er)
