What’s good, family. We’re back again with another KYW thread. And, as always, I am here for you.
The Neutral Grey drop was absolutely devastating. The W’s really came few and far between on it. I’ll be honest — I didn’t even attempt to cop. And, somehow, that L was overshadowed by the debacle that was the Trophy Room 1 drop. Like, fam. Busted raffles, inboxes that have somehow hit capacity. Add in the backdoored pairs and it’s just a complete dumpster fire.
So lay it on me, fam. How are we feeling right now? What do we think of what went down today? And why are we like this again?
So, I hate how sparse the Neutral Grey drop was, 23k pairs w/ an early access is a JOKE. I honestly don't know why Nike was that cheap with it. That's a pair even casual fans gonna want and to be that tight... I don't know.
But MAN the Trophy Room thing REALLY bugs me.
I need to start with the following: from 2008 to 2016 I ran my own ecommerce lifestyle apparel company, we were an eight figure company when I decided to exit. Further, I worked in marketing at Google Cloud (where they develop Gmail, Gsuite and all of that). So I have DEEP DEEP experience in these areas, I'm not just popping off at the mouth when I say this.
This was either the most mismanaged drop I have EVER seen or it was a way cover for some of the back dooring we all saw happen on this drop. I AM NOT accusing anyone of that, I'm just saying it smells.
1. If they have a standard Gmail email box for that raffle a simple text email like they are asking for is anywhere from 15-25k in file size. That means, with NO support at all or increase in spending for storage- a brand new email box like that can handle 500,000-666,000 emails. Even with bots you're about to tell me that all the bandwith was sucked up inside of 93 seconds when I hit send- when one of us saw that coming? Not saying it isn't possible, I AM saying it's unlikely.
2. EVERY. SINGLE. ETAILER. WORTH. A. SHIT. plans for demand spikes. I'd have weekly calls, at least, with my hosting platform leading up to Black Friday/Cyber Monday every year. I did 30% of my yearly business in the month of Christmas, you think we leave that shit to chance. HELL NO. You plan. You test. You test again and again. Trophy Room has had major heat drops before. They've done the work and lived the holidays, saying nothing of the stories I heard from my friends still in the game post-COVID and this past holiday season.
I could, no joke, write 2,000 words on this topic (Sykes you know a publisher and I'd probably do it). Further, I HATE conspiracy theories- I'm 100% an Occam's Razor type of guy. But to think they screwed up and mis-planned THIS much in the face of what we know about the backdoor is seriously straining that the simplest form of the idea here is just incompetence if you have any experience in these areas.
I really hope they address this honestly and openly for the fans. Those shoes are sick and we all knew our chances were slim- but at least we thought we had a chance. After all of this, shit man I feel like we all just got played in the biggest social media hype campaign since Fyre Fest. Which is bullshit.
Seriously dude incredibly well said. There's nothing further really to add to this thing. The entire drop was a shit show. I don't want to read any further into it than that, but I certainly feel like the rep Trophy Room had is completely shot at this point.
I actually work in ecommerce right now so I understand a little bit of this. I think something to understand here is that Trophy Room is a store with one physical location and the only thing separating it from a place like Bodega or Concepts is the owner is Michael Jordan's kid.
The raffle email is probably sparingly used (the last one I entered is for the Off-White 5's back in October) so if they host off of gmail, there might be spam protections put in place. I would assume Shopify (who they use for their platform) also has bot/spam protection, which this probably got hit with hard. So if Hulkapps (a third party company they used for the form) went down, your whole shit goes down. Then you have to update the site to include the thing for the email orders, then you get the safeguard in place for the emails that bounced them. The independent sneaker/streetwear world has a lot to learn about eCommerce.
The reason the drop for the 5's or anything else worked is because they kept expectations low and had them open for a little bit, not this 1 hour window. But the one sentence I fall back on that has never failed me is a quote from Mike Tyson: "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth."
So I FEEL YOU, and you're 100% right. For those reading Peter's got it.
Here's the issue and I say this as the Ops Guy from his firm: this isn't there first heat drop.
In fact, Marcus did a hell of a job reminding us all of what Trophy Room as done in the past with drops with his "What You Got." This is where I was talking about tests.
I built on Shopify too. I have had tons of convos with their support when I was launching, checking those permissions, etc. You mean in the four+ months he's been Flava Flaving this drop no one called 'em up and was like "so we good, right?"
And this has been bugging me since I type my first post: why did they make the email change in the first place? I mean Union runs on Shopify and to attack bots their off schedule/form fillout was genius anti-bot. There was a playbook out there already for things like this- one ALL of us fans LOVED (after a moment of terror when we couldn't go in or when we were trying to remember what color ORANGE was). Shopify is using it as an anti-bot case study now FFS.
Again, I'm not accusing, and maybe part of my problem is all the knowledge I have from a decade+ worth of working is tripping me up and it really was just an 11th hour panic move to email that blew up in someone poor noobs IT person's face.
But I just can't, for the life of me, see how they got where they got using logic and still not question if part of this was because they knew how many pairs went out the backdoor.
I’m personally hopping off the Nike bandwagon for a while. It’s not just Jordan. It’s Sacai, any number of Dunks, anything with a sniff of Virgil about it. Even run of the mill Air Max 90s or 95s can be tough to get these days. I’m more inclined now to give my money to brands who actually want me to wear the shoes. That said, Todd Snyder’s New Balance 992 release was another joke this week!
At least Toddy Snyder ADMITTED it though. That really makes a difference. Well, it will if the next release is different. We get it, you fucked up. Something went wrong. But fix it.
Kind of expected the L's today, so I'm not stressing it at all. it is a shame that Nike/JB keeps putting real consumers through B.S. tactics to obtain shoes, making it harder every release smh.
I think what I'm feeling most right now is a substantial sense of disappointment in the sneaker industry. In no sane world should I be more interested in browsing Goat/StockX/eBay for deals than I am in trying to cop new releases when they first drop, but that's where we're at now.
I simply have no faith in Nike or anyone else to make acquiring cool sneakers an equitable process at all. They've built up massive product demand and consistently underwhelm at making new releases available to the average consumer. Would it really kill them to increase the stock on some of these drops?
Just upping these numbers solves pretty much everything. And I think it gets done eventually, once they realize how many people they're turning away with this strategy. The only question is how long does it take for them to realize this.
On the other side, I feel like we gotta cop to the fact that 2015(ish) Jordan Brand's numbers were low and a lot of retro was going to the outlet stores. I respect the decision to limit, to a point, because of their desire to keep the brand premium and to make sure a drop is worthy to be a drop. I just don't get how 23k can been seen as the number for something that is THIS rare, THIS hot and we've shown matters THIS much.
ESPECIALLY, when next out the shoot is the 6 Carmine's which is another "finally back in OG form" launch and it's all over the place and at least at the 100k level, which still probably isn't enough.
I don't know what the "magic" number is, and I do respect wanting to leave a little extra in the market to ensure the shoes are looked at as premium and special.
Let's say Neutral Grey's US demand was 100,000 pairs (to keep the math simple. Nike has forecasting tools to predict this accurately to (using an standard industry factor of safety, can ya tell I used to do this) +/- 3.5% (side note if you're into politics, a lot of this math is similar to polling margin of error on many levels). And for the sake of exclusivity/premiumship,- let's round it up to 5%. So why no produce 95k pairs?
It's what I don't get, at all. StockX still making money, we all get a much better chance at the heat we love- we all win.
Even if you want to get really tricky with the forecasting and try to predict how many people are going to buy... say the Carmine's in three days if they get the Neutral Greys, you can still forecast it or have less drops, but higher # of units in the drops you do- which, btw's, SAVED NIKE MONEY on cost per unit!
Now I'm all hot and shit again but you get the idea. And as much as I want to find the app dev team for SNKRS and shake them 1/2 the time (SO much they could do there but I feel like I've already been on this soap box too long), Nike has so many other tools to keep us happy, the kicks we want on our feet, AND still protect the brand.
There is such a business case to be made here. You CAN protect the brand AND get us more the kicks we want.
Today was just like every other day. I didn't expect to get any W's (and I most certainly did not get any W's). It still makes me happy when I see a friend or someone that I follow posting a got 'em screenshot online because it's so rare. And it still annoys me when I see people on social media flexing with many many backdoored pairs of a release. This can't last forever right?
The Trophy Room form not loading at all is just an embarrassment, and even on the rare occasion it did load the form showed an error and couldn’t be submitted. The final room-clearing fart to complete an already roaring disaster.
I mean it’s just a mess really. I didn’t try either and I’m glad I didn’t because it really looked like a mess. We have to do better than this artificially manufactured hype. Nobody is gonna want these shoes any less if they make more than 25,000 of them, it’s just ridiculous.
Let's face it, we're not the priority. They don't give a damn about us or whether we get the shoes or not. They have no incentive to fix it because the hysteria over these drops is just so high. People are dropping $500 on Neutral Greys right now on StockX. If you REALLY want that look, go customize some AF1's on Nike for $110 & take a stand against the reseller culture. Where they really worth $200 retail anyway?
If you're going to embed a form like that, why not just use a Google Form? You know that that platform is going to hold up to the traffic, unlike whatever form service they used.
The form was supposed to be integrated into their Shopify stuff, so it would have created cart instances on their Shopify database based on the info from the form/email
Huh, interesting - that probably would've been really cool if it worked. There's no world in which it would have worked though with the traffic they were getting haha.
From the jump, it just felt like the fix was in. While disappointing not having a shot in hell to get either pair, personally I'm just like meh to both because of the shenanigans behind the release of both these pairs today.
Feel like I can’t say anything since I hit, but I think what upsets me the most is how poorly TR handled this. I can handle signing up for 20 raffles for neutrals, trying SNKRS, and not having a single win. TR gave people a miracle of a chance to hit and handled the drop poorly. We saw Todd Snyder yesterday apologize for the early drop on shopify, but we can’t even get a peep from Marcus about this. We just get a snkrs video of him bragging about how “every sneaker head needs to have this shoe in the collection”. I can go on about this but I spent too much energy already
The saddest part about all of this is that none of us are surprised! We all seemed to expect a complete shit show. This game sucks, man.
So, I hate how sparse the Neutral Grey drop was, 23k pairs w/ an early access is a JOKE. I honestly don't know why Nike was that cheap with it. That's a pair even casual fans gonna want and to be that tight... I don't know.
But MAN the Trophy Room thing REALLY bugs me.
I need to start with the following: from 2008 to 2016 I ran my own ecommerce lifestyle apparel company, we were an eight figure company when I decided to exit. Further, I worked in marketing at Google Cloud (where they develop Gmail, Gsuite and all of that). So I have DEEP DEEP experience in these areas, I'm not just popping off at the mouth when I say this.
This was either the most mismanaged drop I have EVER seen or it was a way cover for some of the back dooring we all saw happen on this drop. I AM NOT accusing anyone of that, I'm just saying it smells.
1. If they have a standard Gmail email box for that raffle a simple text email like they are asking for is anywhere from 15-25k in file size. That means, with NO support at all or increase in spending for storage- a brand new email box like that can handle 500,000-666,000 emails. Even with bots you're about to tell me that all the bandwith was sucked up inside of 93 seconds when I hit send- when one of us saw that coming? Not saying it isn't possible, I AM saying it's unlikely.
2. EVERY. SINGLE. ETAILER. WORTH. A. SHIT. plans for demand spikes. I'd have weekly calls, at least, with my hosting platform leading up to Black Friday/Cyber Monday every year. I did 30% of my yearly business in the month of Christmas, you think we leave that shit to chance. HELL NO. You plan. You test. You test again and again. Trophy Room has had major heat drops before. They've done the work and lived the holidays, saying nothing of the stories I heard from my friends still in the game post-COVID and this past holiday season.
I could, no joke, write 2,000 words on this topic (Sykes you know a publisher and I'd probably do it). Further, I HATE conspiracy theories- I'm 100% an Occam's Razor type of guy. But to think they screwed up and mis-planned THIS much in the face of what we know about the backdoor is seriously straining that the simplest form of the idea here is just incompetence if you have any experience in these areas.
I really hope they address this honestly and openly for the fans. Those shoes are sick and we all knew our chances were slim- but at least we thought we had a chance. After all of this, shit man I feel like we all just got played in the biggest social media hype campaign since Fyre Fest. Which is bullshit.
LET EM HAVE IT, TOM
Seriously dude incredibly well said. There's nothing further really to add to this thing. The entire drop was a shit show. I don't want to read any further into it than that, but I certainly feel like the rep Trophy Room had is completely shot at this point.
I actually work in ecommerce right now so I understand a little bit of this. I think something to understand here is that Trophy Room is a store with one physical location and the only thing separating it from a place like Bodega or Concepts is the owner is Michael Jordan's kid.
The raffle email is probably sparingly used (the last one I entered is for the Off-White 5's back in October) so if they host off of gmail, there might be spam protections put in place. I would assume Shopify (who they use for their platform) also has bot/spam protection, which this probably got hit with hard. So if Hulkapps (a third party company they used for the form) went down, your whole shit goes down. Then you have to update the site to include the thing for the email orders, then you get the safeguard in place for the emails that bounced them. The independent sneaker/streetwear world has a lot to learn about eCommerce.
The reason the drop for the 5's or anything else worked is because they kept expectations low and had them open for a little bit, not this 1 hour window. But the one sentence I fall back on that has never failed me is a quote from Mike Tyson: "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth."
So I FEEL YOU, and you're 100% right. For those reading Peter's got it.
Here's the issue and I say this as the Ops Guy from his firm: this isn't there first heat drop.
In fact, Marcus did a hell of a job reminding us all of what Trophy Room as done in the past with drops with his "What You Got." This is where I was talking about tests.
I built on Shopify too. I have had tons of convos with their support when I was launching, checking those permissions, etc. You mean in the four+ months he's been Flava Flaving this drop no one called 'em up and was like "so we good, right?"
And this has been bugging me since I type my first post: why did they make the email change in the first place? I mean Union runs on Shopify and to attack bots their off schedule/form fillout was genius anti-bot. There was a playbook out there already for things like this- one ALL of us fans LOVED (after a moment of terror when we couldn't go in or when we were trying to remember what color ORANGE was). Shopify is using it as an anti-bot case study now FFS.
Again, I'm not accusing, and maybe part of my problem is all the knowledge I have from a decade+ worth of working is tripping me up and it really was just an 11th hour panic move to email that blew up in someone poor noobs IT person's face.
But I just can't, for the life of me, see how they got where they got using logic and still not question if part of this was because they knew how many pairs went out the backdoor.
These are the kind of facts and insights we need.
I’m personally hopping off the Nike bandwagon for a while. It’s not just Jordan. It’s Sacai, any number of Dunks, anything with a sniff of Virgil about it. Even run of the mill Air Max 90s or 95s can be tough to get these days. I’m more inclined now to give my money to brands who actually want me to wear the shoes. That said, Todd Snyder’s New Balance 992 release was another joke this week!
At least Toddy Snyder ADMITTED it though. That really makes a difference. Well, it will if the next release is different. We get it, you fucked up. Something went wrong. But fix it.
I didn’t expect much today. It’s all a joke.
The Trophy Room 1s were the Fyre Fest of sneakers. All hype. Might as well not be real.
Kind of expected the L's today, so I'm not stressing it at all. it is a shame that Nike/JB keeps putting real consumers through B.S. tactics to obtain shoes, making it harder every release smh.
I think what I'm feeling most right now is a substantial sense of disappointment in the sneaker industry. In no sane world should I be more interested in browsing Goat/StockX/eBay for deals than I am in trying to cop new releases when they first drop, but that's where we're at now.
I simply have no faith in Nike or anyone else to make acquiring cool sneakers an equitable process at all. They've built up massive product demand and consistently underwhelm at making new releases available to the average consumer. Would it really kill them to increase the stock on some of these drops?
Just upping these numbers solves pretty much everything. And I think it gets done eventually, once they realize how many people they're turning away with this strategy. The only question is how long does it take for them to realize this.
On the other side, I feel like we gotta cop to the fact that 2015(ish) Jordan Brand's numbers were low and a lot of retro was going to the outlet stores. I respect the decision to limit, to a point, because of their desire to keep the brand premium and to make sure a drop is worthy to be a drop. I just don't get how 23k can been seen as the number for something that is THIS rare, THIS hot and we've shown matters THIS much.
ESPECIALLY, when next out the shoot is the 6 Carmine's which is another "finally back in OG form" launch and it's all over the place and at least at the 100k level, which still probably isn't enough.
I don't know what the "magic" number is, and I do respect wanting to leave a little extra in the market to ensure the shoes are looked at as premium and special.
Let's say Neutral Grey's US demand was 100,000 pairs (to keep the math simple. Nike has forecasting tools to predict this accurately to (using an standard industry factor of safety, can ya tell I used to do this) +/- 3.5% (side note if you're into politics, a lot of this math is similar to polling margin of error on many levels). And for the sake of exclusivity/premiumship,- let's round it up to 5%. So why no produce 95k pairs?
It's what I don't get, at all. StockX still making money, we all get a much better chance at the heat we love- we all win.
Even if you want to get really tricky with the forecasting and try to predict how many people are going to buy... say the Carmine's in three days if they get the Neutral Greys, you can still forecast it or have less drops, but higher # of units in the drops you do- which, btw's, SAVED NIKE MONEY on cost per unit!
Now I'm all hot and shit again but you get the idea. And as much as I want to find the app dev team for SNKRS and shake them 1/2 the time (SO much they could do there but I feel like I've already been on this soap box too long), Nike has so many other tools to keep us happy, the kicks we want on our feet, AND still protect the brand.
There is such a business case to be made here. You CAN protect the brand AND get us more the kicks we want.
Today was just like every other day. I didn't expect to get any W's (and I most certainly did not get any W's). It still makes me happy when I see a friend or someone that I follow posting a got 'em screenshot online because it's so rare. And it still annoys me when I see people on social media flexing with many many backdoored pairs of a release. This can't last forever right?
I don't think it will, Mike. But I also can't say that I think it changes anytime soon. Smh
The Trophy Room form not loading at all is just an embarrassment, and even on the rare occasion it did load the form showed an error and couldn’t be submitted. The final room-clearing fart to complete an already roaring disaster.
I treat releases these days like shooting a 3 from half court. I don’t expect to hit, and I’m surprised if I do.
I mean it’s just a mess really. I didn’t try either and I’m glad I didn’t because it really looked like a mess. We have to do better than this artificially manufactured hype. Nobody is gonna want these shoes any less if they make more than 25,000 of them, it’s just ridiculous.
Let's face it, we're not the priority. They don't give a damn about us or whether we get the shoes or not. They have no incentive to fix it because the hysteria over these drops is just so high. People are dropping $500 on Neutral Greys right now on StockX. If you REALLY want that look, go customize some AF1's on Nike for $110 & take a stand against the reseller culture. Where they really worth $200 retail anyway?
If you're going to embed a form like that, why not just use a Google Form? You know that that platform is going to hold up to the traffic, unlike whatever form service they used.
(This is for the Trophy Room raffle oops)
The form was supposed to be integrated into their Shopify stuff, so it would have created cart instances on their Shopify database based on the info from the form/email
Huh, interesting - that probably would've been really cool if it worked. There's no world in which it would have worked though with the traffic they were getting haha.
From the jump, it just felt like the fix was in. While disappointing not having a shot in hell to get either pair, personally I'm just like meh to both because of the shenanigans behind the release of both these pairs today.
Feel like I can’t say anything since I hit, but I think what upsets me the most is how poorly TR handled this. I can handle signing up for 20 raffles for neutrals, trying SNKRS, and not having a single win. TR gave people a miracle of a chance to hit and handled the drop poorly. We saw Todd Snyder yesterday apologize for the early drop on shopify, but we can’t even get a peep from Marcus about this. We just get a snkrs video of him bragging about how “every sneaker head needs to have this shoe in the collection”. I can go on about this but I spent too much energy already
i feel like i have no dignity now
LOL you're still good in my book, bud.