Sneaker reseller GOAT has a fresh cash hoard with plans to expand, taking its founders well beyond their idea of origin into luxury designer apparel.
A top Nike executive and her shoe reseller son face the wrath of sneakerheads, who think the shoe game is rigged against them.They were boldface names beginning with startup accelerator firm Y Combinator, the venture fund that helped launch Airbnb, DoorDash, Twitch and Reddit, among others. Part of the initial $7.6-million funding round also came from Upfront Ventures , leading Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian.
In 2019, the most recent year for which GOAT has complete statistics, the company caught $72 million in counterfeit shoes, up from $34 million the year before, and the figure probably increased in 2020, Lu said. “As our marketplace grows and our gross merchandise value grows, there’s bound to be more fraud that enters the system.”
“GOAT was always beautifully curated, very sophisticated,” said Hana Mandapat, a senior marketing director for a Fortune 500 company in California who owns more than 200 pairs of sneakers. Both StockX and GOAT have broadened their reach into different kinds of merchandise, but StockX has retained its Wall Street website style, with 52-week resale highs and lows and volatility indexes. The StockX “Stock Market of Things” now includes electronics, watches, handbags, streetwear and trading cards and other collectibles.
GOAT’s aspirations are playing out daily on social media, said Karsen Woods, chief experience officer at 888 The New World, a new digital art and NFT marketplace. Other successful founders in the sneaker sale and resale space say they aren’t worried about GOAT becoming the next Walmart or Amazon, monopolizing the market and thinning out their business.
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