StockX is an online marketplace for luxury sneakers, handbags and clothing such as Retro Jordans, a Hermes Birkin Himalayan crocodile bag in matte, or a Rolex Oyster Perpetual watch. You can even find extremely rare Pokemon cards, like a Charizard-Holo 1999 Base Set, 1st Edition. In November 2018, StockX sold its most expensive item ever: a $70,000 Louis Vuitton x Supreme Malle Courier Trunk. In June 2019, the Detroit-based company reportedly reached a valuation of $1 billion. In half a decade, StockX has gone from a simple sneaker price guide to a resale empire and has set its sights on disrupting the retail market.

Before co-founding StockX, Josh Luber led three tech startups and entered the corporate world as a consultant at IBM in 2010. Luber was a sneakerhead, but “almost deliberately avoided building companies that had to do anything with sneakers.” While researching data at IBM, Luber realized that eBay was the largest marketplace for reselling sneakers, but multiple sellers were offering different prices for the same product.

Luber thought the sneaker resale market would benefit from following a barter model. This system would help reduce uncertainty and mean that every sneaker listed on the exchange has one true market value. In 2012, Luber started a side project called Campless, which collected data from eBay resellers to look at the prices of all sneakers sold through auction on the platform. This essentially created a price guide for reselling shoes for sneakerheads.

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How StockX built a billion-dollar sneaker resale empire

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