The Sneaker Resale Market Crashed. Here's What the Data Actually Shows
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7 min read
In 2023, a Jordan 1 "Lost & Found" retailed for $180 and resold for $500 to $600. Today you can buy the same pair for the high $200s, maybe $300. That is not one unlucky release. It is what Mike Sykes II of Business of Fashion told NPR on 4 January 2026: "the values are deflated at this point." A market that once ran on hype now runs on real supply and demand, and the sneaker resale market data from the last three years shows exactly how that happened.
Platforms like StockX and GOAT work like a real exchange, not a normal shop. A seller lists a pair, a buyer bids or buys at the asking price, and the platform authenticates the shoe before it ships. That authentication step is the whole point: it is what lets a stranger's used sneakers sell for more than a brand-new pair sitting in a mall store, when demand is high enough.
For years, demand for the rarest releases ran far ahead of supply. Sykes told NPR that a few years ago, limited editions commonly resold at a 100% to 200% premium over retail. "Nowadays, that's not the case," he said, "and people aren't willing to do that anymore."
The clearest case study is Yeezy, the Adidas line built around Kanye West (Ye). Adidas ended the partnership in October 2022 after Ye's antisemitic comments, and immediately faced a problem: warehouses full of shoes tied to a name it no longer wanted attached to its brand.
The numbers that followed are all from Adidas's own reported results. Yeezy revenue fell from €750 million ($803 million) in 2023 to €650 million ($696 million) in 2024, a roughly 13% decline, as Adidas wound the line down (Sportico, reporting on Adidas's 2024 annual results). Adidas began selling off the remaining stock in May 2023, and by March 2025 it confirmed the last pair was gone. "There is not one Yeezy shoe left," CFO Harm Ohlmeyer said. "It has all been sold and that episode is behind us" (SneakerNews, 5 March 2025).
Nike's Dunk line shows the same mechanic without any celebrity scandal at all. Nike pushed out more than 150 new Dunk colorways in 2023, chasing demand that had made the shoe one of resale's biggest winners. By 2024, Business of Fashion reported, roughly 75% of Dunks were sitting unsold on shelves. Nike's response, under new CEO Elliott Hill, was to cut new Dunk releases back to a few dozen a year and let sales fall an expected 70% over two years, deliberately rebuilding scarcity instead of chasing volume (Hypebeast, March 2025, citing Business of Fashion's reporting). StockX's own sixth annual Current Culture Index, released in January 2025, recorded Nike Dunk resale prices down 41% year over year through 2024.
The lesson is not "avoid Nike." It is that flooding any hyped sneaker with supply, whether that supply comes from a brand split or from the shoe's own maker, brings its resale price back toward retail.
StockX's seventh annual Current Culture Index, covering 2025 and released in January 2026, found Nike and Jordan average resale prices up 5% and 6% year over year respectively, which StockX itself called "early signs of recovery." Nike, Jordan, Adidas, New Balance and Asics topped the best-seller list for a third straight year.
But the same report shows the money moving somewhere new. Mizuno's sales on StockX rose 124% year over year in 2025, and Asics rose 45%, both driven by running shoes rather than basketball silhouettes. That looks less like a return to the old hype cycle and more like buyers rotating into a different category entirely.
Even GOAT, one of the two biggest resale platforms, has hedged its own bet on hype. On 31 March 2026 it launched Sneakers.com, a separate storefront selling new, brand-name sneakers at up to 91% off, with an average order value of just $70 against $150-plus on GOAT's main resale marketplace. A GOAT Group executive told Yahoo Finance and PR Newswire the launch reflected "a moment where value really matters." A platform built on collectible resale opening a discount outlet is itself a data point on where the broader sneaker resale market data is pointing.
Indonesia has its own resale infrastructure, separate from StockX or GOAT. Kick Avenue, founded in Jakarta in 2017 by Christopher Eko, Alwin Sasmita and Reinaldo Gunawan, is the country's largest consignment marketplace for sneakers, streetwear and luxury goods, authenticating items in-house before resale. It raised a $2.9 million Series A round in February 2023, backed by South Korea's KREAM and Malaysia's SneakerLAH (AIM Group, 2 February 2023). Novelship, headquartered in Singapore and founded in October 2018, runs a comparable authenticated marketplace across Southeast Asia, including Indonesia.
Underneath both platforms sits a large informal layer: jastip (jasa titip, or buy-on-behalf) Instagram sellers and city-specific Facebook buy-sell groups, where sneakers change hands with no built-in authentication at all. That informal channel is real and widely used, but it carries a fake risk that a platform's in-house authentication is specifically built to remove. If a deal looks too good against Kick Avenue's or Novelship's own listed prices for the same pair, that gap is the first thing to question, not the last.
A pair of sneakers sitting in your closet is a real asset, but the data above says most of them behave like a depreciating one, not an appreciating one. On NetWort's Holdings page, sneakers fit under Luxury Goods, and the same split that applies to designer bags applies here: Standard, which defaults to -15% a year, fits an ordinary pair including most past hype releases once the resale premium fades, and Collectible, which defaults to +5% a year, should be reserved for a specific pair with real, current resale data behind it, not last year's headline price.
Nike's shoes and Nike's stock are two different bets with two different risk profiles. If what you actually want to track is the company rather than a specific pair of sneakers, its shares trade as NKE, a separate holding with its own price history entirely.
A worked example makes the swing concrete: at today's USD/IDR rate of roughly Rp17,725 (27 August 2026, cross-checked against Bank Indonesia and Trading Economics data, a rate that moves daily and is worth checking against the current macro data before you rely on it), that Jordan 1 "Lost & Found" example converts like this.
| Point in time | Price (USD) | Converted to IDR |
|---|---|---|
| Retail, 2023 | $180 | Rp3,190,500 |
| Peak resale, shortly after release | $500 to $600 | Rp8,862,500 to Rp10,635,000 |
| Resale today, per NPR/Business of Fashion (Jan 2026) | high $200s to $300 | roughly Rp4,960,000 to Rp5,317,500 |
The gap between the peak and today's price is the resale premium disappearing, not the shoe itself losing physical value. That is the part a receipt from 2023 will never show you.
For the same "one number versus the real, dated data" gap in other collectible categories, our breakdown of collectibles and liquidity risk and designer handbag resale data against gold cover the comparable spread for watches, art and luxury bags.