Sneaker YouTube is a growing genre where there are several different types of videos and content that are being made. You have higher-end productions like Complex’s “Sneaker Shopping With Joe La Puma,” where he takes celebrity guests to sneaker stores and then interviews them, sees what they purchase, and gets their thoughts on sneakers.

You also have debate shows like the one I’m involved with on Sole Collector called “Full Sized Run.” And you also have a lot of independent creators out there making their own vlog-style content who aren’t attached to any media company. The video might be going through their day, they might have a new pick up they want to show, they may have their thoughts on some sort of sneaker content, or they might even have beef with another sneaker YouTuber. And it’s always usually first-person style following them around the city if they’re on tour if they’re going to a Sneaker Con event, or just what’s going on in their life.

And people really get attached to these personalities. You have guys like Qias Omar, who has a lot of vlogs. You have someone like Jacques Slade, who’s known for his unboxing videos. It’s a true unboxing where he takes boxes and cracks them open right on camera, and you find out what’s there. They don’t let you know in the title what their shoes are, so you get the feeling of suspense.

If you’re in the know about footwear, you probably have a feel for what’s in that box. But for a lot of kids, they get excited. Unboxing videos are huge on YouTube right now. You have people unboxing Disney characters that have tens of millions of views. It may seem like pretty silly content, but there really is some excitement around seeing the unknown and having it revealed in front of you.

We do the unboxing videos. We do the decor content. But we’re also trying to figure out ways to look at things through a different lens. One way is through our game show on Facebook called “Price the Hype,” where we took the format of a similar show on TV (which I won’t name) and injected sneakers into it.

We make up these mini-games where we force a person to actually pretend to buy their shoes with an app we built and then take a photo of their shoes to do a real quick flex. If they do that, they win a challenge. If they don’t win the challenge, maybe we pour chocolate syrup on the $1,000 pair of sneakers that they were trying to get!

There are also some debate and opinion style shows like “Full Size Run” or “Quickstrike,” where it takes on an ESPN “Around the Horn” feel. There are people with opposite views on the same sneaker or sneaker-related topic, and they debate.

Indie Media Creators Hold Brands Accountable

A lot of people accuse sneaker media of being too safe in terms of their relationships with brands and with stores and them being afraid to call people out. We created the show so we could do just that. And some of the people at the brands aren’t happy about it, but we’re glad that we get to speak our voice.

A lot of sneaker media is very objective, and it’s just giving you the straight facts about what’s happening, what’s releasing, how did this release go down, things like that. We’re there to give our own opinions, tell you why we think this shoe was a garbage fire, why we think this shoe is better than other people realize, why this designer messed up, things like that.

There’s a couple of reasons why you need to remain authentic in sneaker media. One is that the brands really need you more than you need them. You’re here to serve the community, not necessarily the brands. I think a lot of people let that slip and don’t realize to what extent they need to be honest with people about exactly what happened. And I understand because it’s a difficult relationship to maintain. If you’re going to tell people how Adidas messed this thing up and you’ve got a contact at Adidas, it makes them look bad. But you’ve got to tell the truth.

Also, you have to think about your authenticity when a brand approaches you with some type of partnership. Maybe you’ve got enough of a social following for them to want you to take a little bit of money to post something on your Instagram.

The first question is, do you actually like that thing? Is that a shoe you would actually wear? The second thing is, is it going to alienate your audience or your followers if you’re on there shilling with a hashtag ad post about how much you like this shoe? I’ve taken money to post things on my Instagram before. I got plenty of hate for it, but it was a shoe I actually liked, and I felt comfortable with it.

Can Social Media Make Money for Creators?

There’s a lot of different ways to get paid off of social media. There’s traditional ad revenue where you’re getting a cut of the ads from YouTube. Influencers might be offered sponsorships where a brand might come in and offer them a nice check to exclusively wear a certain brand in their videos. And there’s a traditional corporate sense, which I fall into, where the company gets the ad revenue, and you get a salary. When I started out as a freelance writer, I was getting paid per story. It may start out as a passion project, but there are different ways to actually pay your bills through sneaker media.

There’s also vlogging, which is a popular format in sneaker media. Take examples like Money Kicks, who is a 16-year-old kid who just happens to have billionaire parents and wild exotic animals at home. You know, he documents how he lives his life. And it could be Fat Joe and Khaled coming by his place to meet his monkey or his lion! Another one that we use at Complex is called “Life at Complex,” where it’s Tony. It’s just his day-to-day life or just things that go on at the Complex office. One aspect is opening the mail that we get from our viewers. We get a lot of really cool promotional packages from a lot of different companies, and not just from sneaker brands.

So, there’s a lot of different formats. There might be one that doesn’t even exist yet. I think the most important part is knowing that there’s going to be an audience for something and doing something that you know will give a unique point of view on footwear that hasn’t been seen before. There are a lot of ways to get into sneaker media. You don’t just have to be a blogger or a YouTuber, which is what most people first think of when they think of sneaker education. You can just run a really good curated Instagram or Snapchat account.

One example that comes to mind is Corgishoe. He’s built a following based on just buying sneakers on clearance and then storing them for years before he sells them on his Instagram. And people will find him, and they’ll say, I remember these. I forgot these existed. He’ll resell them on his Instagram and then delete the photo right after. It’s all about finding a niche or finding a way that is, one, relevant to you and that an audience is looking for.

Our show “Full Sized Run” all started off as a Facebook Live broadcast every week before it got to YouTube and before we had sponsorship money. You look at DJ Khaled’s Jordan partnership. I feel like that started off when he was a real pioneer in using Snapchat first and cultivating an audience.

There are also these super-niche audiences. One guy that comes to mind is Brad Hall. His unboxings are kind of a mix of dry humor and comedy and an actual unique point of view on products. He’s not really taking himself too seriously. The quality of it is almost something that could be seen on Comedy Central. That’s just one example of how you can have a super targeted audience outside of just the Complex’s and the Sole Collectors and the Sneaker News and the Nice Kicks talk.

When it comes to sneaker media, it’s basically just like any other media except that it’s specialized to a sneaker audience in the same way that Auto Trader, for example, is for car buffs or Sports Illustrated is for sports buffs. Sneaker media is for sneakerheads. The only real difference is that sneaker media is still fairly new.

There are a lot of different types of sneaker media. For example, there are actual print magazines, like Sole Collector had for about 10 years, or Slam Kicks. So these are actual print, in-your-hand stories about sneakers and upcoming sneakers that you might want to buy. There are internet blogs, like Sole Collector, Complex Sneakers, Nice Kicks, or Sneaker News, for example. These blogs are kind of the same thing only they’re online-based and a little bit more daily—a little bit more immediate.

Then, there is social media. This could be an Instagram account that you follow for release info, or it could be sort of like a specialized, curated social media platform dedicated to one kind of genre in sneakers. As an example, there are Instagram handles that are solely dedicated to Air Jordans, and there’s nothing else they post on there except Air Jordans.

Sneaker media has really changed with how media itself has been evolving. If you think about it, when was the last time you bought a newspaper? These days, we live in a digital society. We have a smart computer in our pockets practically 24/7, essentially. It’s a lot more fast-paced, and people want their news more immediately, to their phones or laptops, as opposed to waiting for the next season to get their Eastbay, or Kicks, or Sole Collector magazine.

Nowadays, sneaker media is literally any platform you could distribute sneaker-related content on. Anyone can sign up for a free Twitter account. Anyone can sign up for a free Instagram account. Anyone can get a Gmail address and be on YouTube overnight. Back in the day when I first started publishing videos on YouTube, I was using tapes—actual video tapes. These days, you could shoot 4K slow-motion on your iPhone 10.

With that being said, once the barriers to entry come down, you’re going to get content that’s a lot worse overall. If we’re being honest, this is just because you don’t really have to know much or have much to get into it. That being said, though, if you’re really good, and really knowledgeable, and really passionate about what you do, then you can rise above the clutter that exists at the bottom level. If you have an iPhone and you have a social media account, you’re in the game. So to stand out, you really have to be making quality content.

Exploring online sneaker education is a fantastic way to attain all of the knowledge and experience that a sneaker education offers. It requires nothing more than an internet connection and an interest in the subject matter, so consider trying it out.

Years ago, there was a website called Dress Like Kanye West. It was run by a guy who actually ended up working at Complex, who now works at Adidas—a very smart guy. But these kinds of sites were popping up because Kanye’s influence at the time was so crazy that everybody wanted to know what he was wearing.

Now, Upscale Hype is a website that’s basically devoted to breaking down people’s outfits. Now Complex does a lot of this kind of thing. When these brands started doing it, that’s around the time we started seeing the shift in people wanting to act cool and act like they don’t pay attention to what celebrities are wearing. But it isn’t true. Everybody pays attention.

Back then, Kanye was at the forefront of having a whole website devoted to what he was wearing, breaking down his outfit. If he was overseas, and he wore some obscure new clothes, people were trying to find out what they were. In a way, this paved the way for how sneaker culture has developed since then.

Whether it’s on Instagram or another social media medium, it’s about being first to post that a certain person was wearing these sneakers. Or that this person just debuted these. Or LeBron James just wore these. And now you can even see it through the tunnels in NBA and NFL games. There is such an appetite now for big stars and athletes to walk through the tunnel and see what they’re wearing, and then it immediately goes online.

And these aren’t even just sneaker blogs that are posting this stuff. It’s also sports blogs posting it. These days, you get the sense that everyone knows that the cameras are watching. Everyone is taking a more deliberate approach to fashion and being seen, and brands are working with celebrities and athletes to make sure that the debut of a shoe that everyone’s waiting for is spectacular and happens in the biggest way possible.

In the past, there wasn’t as much content to see what celebrities were wearing, especially on their feet, and not broken down the way it is now. And because that has changed, everything has changed. I know that at Complex, for example, everyone is always rushing when someone debuts something new to get a post up on Instagram because it helps to build the hype machine and help build up steam for those releases.

These newer things like the celebrity co-signs, celebrities being photographed all the time, and celebrities deliberately working with brands to debut sneakers for big events have really changed sneaker media and the way that it operates.

To learn more about how the sneaker industry and media are evolving and growing, consider exploring the world of online sneaker education. If you’ve been looking for an affordable and accessible means to achieve a sneaker education, it can serve as an amazing option.

Young people have a lot of stories to tell. It’s important to explore finding your own voice. Have that conversation, even if it’s just with your friends and family to start, but make it something that can eventually be consumed by a larger audience. You need to have a true, common storyline and theme in the sneaker industry. Following what other people have already gotten popular off of isn’t going to help you much because you’re jumping into a crowded pool.

Kicks, the magazine, was something that grew out of Slam. Slam is that connection between culture and basketball, and sneakers are something that sits right on that edge. Sneakers are not something that transcends basketball. Obviously, basketball transcends sneakers.

A Visit to the Nike Campus

We knew that in order to find the sneaker history, the online sneaker education, a lot of that was at Nike, at their campus, and at the Wieden and Kennedy offices. It was a matter of convincing Nike to bankroll this. At its most base editorial level, it was a couple of guys who found something they were fascinated with and wanted to find answers to. If this was something we were interested in knowing about, there were probably a lot of other people interested in knowing about it as well.

In many ways, we had it easy, because people hadn’t done this before. People hadn’t gone to Wieden and Kennedy and asked about the Spike and Mike ads. People hadn’t gone to Eric Cooper and asked about him designing Scottie Pippen’s new shoe yet. Now that stuff is fairly commonplace.

Gaining a Sneaker Education

Sneaker media and Kicks and Bobbito’s story opened this lane to anyone who wanted to try and fill it. There’s something out there that you don’t know the answer to, but you’re interested enough to seek it out. To find what that answer is and talk to the right people and look at the right sources.

Find Your Unique Audience

Chances are, other people are going to want to know the answers too. That’s the way to open whatever the next lane of sneaker media will be. Because, like it was for us, the audience is there. The audience is waiting for you. They just need the right thing, and maybe you’re going to be the one to provide them with that.

If I were a sneaker exec now, I’d be pretty excited about the way a new shoe can get marketed or the way a retro shoe can get remarketed. The second a sneaker gets released and goes into the general market, you have so many people on social media being creative in doing things around it and hoping to share it with like-minded people. Back in the ’80s, and even in the ’90s, it was a very straight line. The company produced the sneaker, and a creative agency produced a commercial. The commercial was used to sell that sneaker, and that was pretty much it.

The consumer bought it, and the consumer wore it. The consumer maybe bought it and put it away. But the company was on to the next thing. By the time the commercials came out for the Penny II, they were deep into the Penny III. They were pretty much done with it.

Sneaker Education in Marketing

The retro market has obviously done something to change this, and the resale market has, too. We can dislike resellers all we want but it’s a reality that’s not going away. Look at consignment shops. Sneakers have a secondary life. The lifespan doesn’t end when the design is done, and the factories are producing it.

You get to remarket these shoes. If I were a sneaker company exec, I’d be looking to the consumer. This doesn’t have to be a one-way thing where the company produces the shoe and says, “Here you go.” I think the company can produce the shoe, say, “Here you go,” and then say, “What do you think? What do you want to do with it?”

Social Media Lessons for Online Sneaker Education

Whether it’s an unboxing video or a sneaker shopping episode with someone who doesn’t necessarily endorse your product talking about it, there are just so many avenues. It should all be two-way. I think social media has opened that up to a degree. You can find all these different sneaker designers on Instagram.

And they’re not hugely popular. Sorry, sneaker designers, you’re not Justin Timberlake. You won’t have hundreds of millions of followers. But the good thing about that is, you might be able to actually talk to these people.

When I was at Slam, if I wrote a story, three months later it might get published. A month after that I would get letters about it. Now, if I write something online, I’m getting responses on Twitter immediately about how terrible it is or how good it is. The feedback is so fast.

With sneakers, that shoe isn’t going to go away. That campaign isn’t going to go away. You can be part of it. So it’s interesting to see where it goes. As much as brands are speaking to you, they’re also listening to you, whether it’s at round tables or focus groups.

Before, people would have to pay you $200 to go to a focus group and listen to them talk about some shoe. You, as a millennial, could tell them what you think about it. Now those conversations are going on every day everywhere. And there’s no reason why you can’t be part of them. And there’s no reason why you can’t change what happens in the future.

I think the two most important people you have to talk about when you talk about early sneaker industry media are Bobbito Garcia and Russ Bankston. These are two people that anyone who’s into sneaker education or wants to write about sneakers should know about and study. These are guys who convinced bigger platforms that there was a reason to talk about sneakers beyond in the sneaker store, beyond in your living room. These are the kind of guys who made it a point to talk about sneakers on a bigger level to a national audience and even to an international audience.

That really paved the way for people like me to be able to have a job in the industry because now so many more people realize that these are things that readers and audiences care about. Russ is important because sneaker media, writing about or even caring about sneakers, is a relatively young thing, and it’s important for us to have older people whom we can look up to who have been around long enough and who remember these stories. A lot of these stories rely on brands to tell you, and you can’t always trust the brands when it comes to online sneaker education. You need to have actual people who were there who remember these things. Russ is one of those guys. Actually, Russ is that guy.

A partnership is a type of business structure like a corporation, an LLC or a sole proprietorship. You can learn more about business structures in online sneaker education or any beginning business classes. For now, let’s focus on partnerships.

There are two types of partnerships: general and limited. In a general partnership, two or more people carry on the business for profit and act on behalf of the company, either as agents or in some other type of binding capacity. The people involved could be individuals or corporations.

A limited partnership is basically the same as a general partnership, but at least one of the partners will be a limited partner. Limited partners can act on behalf of the business without being liable for the debts and obligations of the partnership.

Designing sneakers in a partnership has advantages and disadvantages over using other business structures.

Advantages of Partnerships in the Sneaker Industry

As a partner, unlike a sole proprietor, you’re not by yourself. One of the biggest advantages is that you don’t have to make business decisions alone. You can have partners to share the work and come up with ideas. You can take on employees, and you can create a much bigger construct for your business.

You can also obtain outside investments, which is impossible to do under a sole proprietorship. You can raise capital and do more with your business.

There aren’t many formalities in a partnership, but there are certainly more than in a sole proprietorship. The interests of a partnership can also be assignable, which means that if someone comes along and wants to buy your business or buy out a partner, you can assign those interests to someone else.

Limited partners are not personally liable for the acts and obligations of the partnership. The big advantage for a limited partner is owning a stake in the company without the financial risk. This is a huge advantage over a sole proprietorship in which the owner has unlimited personal liability for the debt of the company.

Partnership Disadvantages

What are some of the disadvantages of a partnership when you’re creating sneakers? First of all, a partnership is not considered a separate legal entity from the individual partners that are running it. General partners can have unlimited personal liability, just like in a sole proprietorship.

For general partners, a person’s interests can also dissolve upon death. That means that the partner’s estate, spouse, or the party who would normally inherit their assets will not get that interest. It would go back to the partnership.

Something else that can be a disadvantage or an advantage, depending on how you like to treat your taxes, is pass-through taxation. The only way to avoid the individual income tax burden is to structure your business as an S-Corp or an LLC that’s taxed as one.

How Do You Form a Partnership in the Sneaker Industry?

Like sole proprietorships, partnerships are created with very few formalities. In fact, you can form them just by carrying on business with one or more partners. This can vary from state to state, but typically the requirements are pretty lax.

You may need to register your company in the state where you’re doing business. Design courses and sneaker education courses that focus on the business side should stress the importance of a legal partnership agreement, too.

Formal partnership agreements are recommended but not required by most state laws. However, we highly recommend that when you enter into any kind of a partnership with business associates you should consult a lawyer to create the partnership agreement.

The shoes that NBA players wear on the court has its own history. If you go back into the ’70s and the early ’80s, kind of the outlaw days of the NBA and the ABA, you had guys wearing a lot of wild stuff. Sometimes it seems like things now are crazier than they’ve ever been. But if you go back to the ’70s and ’80s, you will find Boston Celtics wearing green suede shoes, or things completely different from anyone else.

I think, obviously, these pre dress code days, maybe there wasn’t too much concern about what guys wore. Then you get into the ’80s, and the now famous Michael Jordan brand show, the black and red shoe while his team was primarily wearing white, they needed everyone to sort of be similar so they weren’t going to let him wear that shoe. That obviously turned into a moment for Nike. That turned into an entire marketing campaign, and those $5,000 fines the NBA levied were nothing compared to the hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue they made selling that shoe.

It kind of moved into a stage where you would have guys wearing player editions. I know us at Slam would look at that and go look at photos of the NBA. You’d also look at what they were wearing. There would be things that were not available at retail and whether it was just embroidery or different colors than you could find in the store, it was still something different and something else to highlight.

I don’t know when this would have changed – probably in the 2000s. The NBA encored sneaker has kind of become self-aware, if you want to say it that way. Guys already knew that what they were wearing, was going to get noticed. I think if you look back in the ’80s, someone like a Tiny Archibald wearing a green suede pair of Blazers, I mean he knows he’s fly but, I don’t think he knows that people are really going to be pointing out his shoes.

Now you have it where before a shoe even makes it on a blog, you have a player themselves maybe taking a picture of their shoes on their way to the game or in their locker saying, “Look out for this.” They’re breaking their own news about what they’re wearing.

Online Sneaker Education: Evolving the On-court Sneaker

You have guys like PJ Tucker, who might not be known very much for what he does on the court, but he’s known for what he wears on the court. He’s a guy who wore the Virgil Air Jordan 1s on the court. Who does that? I think Gilbert Arenas maybe was the one who ushered in this whole era of, “You never know what a guy is going to wear from one night to the next.”

Kobe did it too, when he was a sneaker free agent, wearing a different pair virtually every night. Whatever, they’re pro athletes. They can get away with it. I mean, you look at someone like Michael Jordan who wore a new pair every night, but it was a new pair of the same couple of colors. He wasn’t wearing like anything made for him specifically super crazy.

Now you have guys wearing a different pair almost every game. Basketball drove sneaker culture for a while, kind of unaware of what they were doing, maybe. Now they know all too well what they’re doing, and guys get you to tune in just to see what they’re going to wear on court.

Basically, with sneaker education, anything that happens in sneakers now is going to be scrutinized to an insane degree, and that applies to court sneaker coverage. There are a handful of guys in the league, like PJ Tucker, DeMar DeRozan, and guys like Nick Young, who wear cool, rare, vintage sneakers on a regular basis.

People want to know what they are wearing, what they are bringing out of their closet, what did LeBron James scribble on the midsole of his shoe, what is that Black Lives Matter message that some player wanted to send through their footwear, and things like that. Players have taken advantage of this, too, by referencing social movements or maybe a family friend who died, things like that. They’re using their sneakers to actually say something.