Sole Collector Magazine highlighted the sneaker industry in a way nothing had before. It was a quarterly print magazine just dedicated to sneakers that started in the early 2000s. It profiled actual collectors, and you could read about other people who had the same passion as you did.

It’s a website now that highlights new sneaker releases, reviews shoes, and features interviews with people who influence sneaker culture.

Another moment that I feel moved sneaker media forward was Kicks On Court and Celeb Kicks that happened through Nice Kicks, a website all about sneakers. Those became places you could get your internet dose of what players were wearing in the NBA, and what your favorite rapper or entertainer was wearing through paparazzi photos.

Another key moment was probably the show Sneaker Shopping. There was really nothing like that that had existed before. It was the zenith of where we are now with sneaker culture. It started in 2014 and is in its tenth season now.

The show features celebrities who are identifying themselves as sneaker-heads and athletes or entertainers that are identifying themselves as sneaker-heads. You get to see what clothes and sneakers they’re into because you’re actually going on a shopping experience with them.

Another major media moment for sneakers came when Vine was the big thing. Remember the meme about shoes that went: “Officer, I got one question for you. What are those?”

Usually, internet memes come and go. They’re hot for a week and then gone, but that shoe meme felt like it lasted for months. It spawned sneaker podcasts that were named after it. People used the audio from it in their Vines and their posts on Snapchat or Instagram.

Sneaker education has changed along with the media, too. Online sneaker education has replaced a lot of in-person classes and internships.

The media highlights how similar the sneaker industry is now to the way it was 10 or 15 years ago. The media covering the sneaker industry has changed, but what people are looking for and want to be a part of is still the same.

One example is the collector profiles in Sole Collector Magazine. You would open those pages up and read about other collectors who had this same passion for Air Jordans as you did.

Now, instead of looking at a paper magazine, you’re connecting with these people through Facebook in an Air Jordan Facebook group or through the curated people that you follow on Twitter or Instagram.

There are new ways to consume media today, but I think the core tenants of it and why people consume it are still the same.

Gary Warnett, who had his own blog, GWARIZM, passed away last year. He also wrote for sites like Complex, and Crooked Tongues, a forum that went into retail. He wrote for a bunch of brands and was probably the most notable sneaker writer of all time. In the early 2000s, sites like Hype Beast and Highs Nobiliety came up. Sneaker News and Complex really tapped into sneaker media. They started off really bare bones but they’ve become a lot more robust over the years, and now you have a lot of sites getting into sneaker coverage.

Sneaker Education in Media

GQ, the Bleacher Report, and Sports Illustrated are all covering sneakers now. Speaking of Sports Illustrated, they had a revolutionary article published, I believe, in 1990, called “Your Sneakers are Your Life.” It detailed a story in Chicago about a kid getting murdered over a pair of Air Jordans sneakers, and on the cover is a pair of Air Jordan 5s with a bookbag and a gun on them. That moment has always led sneaker journalism, especially from a very mainstream response.

A colleague of mine, Rich, started Kicks in the City, which has been around forever. Rich is a super important dude in the world of sneaker media. He did it all by himself for many years and really killed it. People don’t necessarily give Kicks in the City the credit it deserves, but it was one of the first, if not the first, sneaker blogs. For whatever reason, some other sites did a better job expanding their brand, but Rich was there first.

A little bit after, there was Kicksology. Professor K back in the day. These things all came from the forums. After that, it became commercialized a little bit to where people realized, hey, we can tell these stories and turn it into a business, rather than just a community. Now the game is overrun, and you have a million websites, a million Instagram accounts, a million Twitter accounts that serve this information.

Sneaker Media Evolution for Students in Online Sneaker Education

Back then, it was totally different. You didn’t have as many sources. You didn’t have as many shops taking photos of their sneakers and posting them online. I wasn’t working in sneaker media during that early era, but just looking back on it and seeing the kind of content people were creating, you can tell how different it is. How much they still had to learn. I mean, those things are important, but we’re really on a different level now as far as what we’re thinking about or what we can accomplish or basically how seriously the brands take us.

The Olympics have always been a big opportunity for not only sneaker companies and the sneaker industry, but also for fans of sneakers or sneaker fanatics. You always see a lot of new things in the Olympics. This has been true back as far as the ’30s. One example of Olympic branding opportunities was when Jesse Owens wore Dassler Brother track spikes when he won multiple golds in Nazi Germany. If you look at a lot of Adidas’ classic trainers, you could call them all-purpose trainers, you’d have stuff like the Rome and the Montreal, or the SL72. A lot of those classic trainers are named after either cities where the Olympics were held in. Companies have also used the year the Olympics occurred, in the case of the SL72. Adidas dominated that market for a long time, if for the only reason that they had sort of that grasp on the European market and on doing all-purpose trainers. Nike didn’t exist as Nike until 1972. In starting Nike, Bill Bowerman and Phil Knight got runners wearing the shoes. Steve Prefontaine was a big example. He was an Olympic runner from Oregon. He Died tragically in a car accident when he was in his early 20s. He didn’t even get a chance to run in what would have been hopefully his redemption Olympics. He’s the person on whom Nike based a lot of the ideals of their running business, where he would come out so strong and want to just run everybody into the ground. He would not be able to carry through the line, even though his records did stand for a very, very long time. I believe some of them still do. Later on, if you want to jump ahead, you would get Michael Johnson in 1996 running in gold spikes. That was a big historical event in sneaker education. The gold shoes. There was just something so prideful about that. I was in college at the time having our athlete kick butt on the world stage in our country wearing gold shoes. Nothing said “America” more than that in my mind- his swagger, his dominance, and those shoes were just kind of a perfect combination for saying, “Welcome to the United States, we’re here to kick your butt in track, and we’re going to have the world’s best athletes in the world’s best footwear.” That’s what I really remember distinctly when it comes to shoes in Olympic games. The Olympics is a very important platform for sneaker brands to show off their latest technology. Nike, in particular, always takes advantage of this stage. In 2008, they brought out their lunar cushioning foam. That went on to be an important piece of sneaker technology for the brand for years to come so remember that as you continue your online sneaker education. In 2012, at the Olympics, Nike used that platform to roll out Flyknit, which of course is now a billion-dollar franchise. Nike is the brand that most takes advantage of the Olympics, but of course, everyone wants to be part of this gigantic global sporting moment. I think the amount to which brands want to put their logos on athletes for these types of moments, like the Olympics, shows just how incredibly important it is for them. This is true whether the logo is on the athletes when they walk in or when they’re on the medal stand. There’s a famous story from the 1992 dream team. Michael Jordan didn’t want to show the Reebok logo on his Team USA jacket, so he put the jacket over his shoulder or obscured the logo. This was because he was a Nike athlete, because he is such a huge Nike guy. Nike had paid him so much money up to that point and continues to make him billions of dollars. There was no way he was going to show off a Reebok logo. So if you look at the images from that event from that medal stand, a couple of the Nike guys are very carefully obscuring the logos on their Reebok jackets. You had much of the dream team in ’92 wearing Nikes. It was Michael Jordan in his 7s with the number 9 on the back, Scottie Pippen in the Air Flight Lite, and then even Charles Barkley, David Robinson, and John Stockton all in different Nike inline models done up specifically for the ’92 Olympics. I remember seeing them in stores, and again, that was like innovation, an event marked in a specific time. Unfortunately, with an event, if you bought it right then, you were of the moment. It was perfect, but just for those moments. Six months from then, it didn’t really matter how cool the shoe was. The event was over. In those days, especially in the early ’90s, before retro really became a big thing, it was more important to be in the moment and have whatever the cool shoe was right then. If you are wearing Air Jordan 1s in 1990, that wasn’t necessarily cool. That was sort of saying you’re behind. What are you waiting for? So the Olympics would always mark something and establish it as the new thing, whether it was the Lunar Racer, or the first Hyper Dunk, or the Flyknit Trainer and the Flyknit Racer. It was an opportunity to look at Nike. Adidas did the “made in Germany” Prime Knit for the Olympics, and you know those are very, very hard to find, but the Olympics is still that showcase for new technology and new shoes.

if(window.strchfSettings === undefined) window.strchfSettings = {};window.strchfSettings.stats = {url: “https://yellowbrick-co.storychief.io/en/the-history-of-nikes-presence-at-the-olympics?id=2016820546&type=2”,title: “The History of Nike’s Presence at the Olympics”,id: “a31febc5-c31d-435b-9c43-2aa027c870b0”};(function(d, s, id) {var js, sjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if (d.getElementById(id)) {window.strchf.update(); return;}js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id;js.src = “https://d37oebn0w9ir6a.cloudfront.net/scripts/v0/strchf.js”;js.async = true;sjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, sjs);}(document, ‘script’, ‘storychief-jssdk’))

Sneakerhead culture has significantly grown since the 1980’s. As music and sports embraced sneakers, the industry’s influence on shaping the identity of its consumers has been visible. Whether it’s repping you’re hometown or your favorite sports team, sneakers have emerged as an visual way to express who you are. Russ Bengtson, sneaker writer and editor, spoke to Yellowbrick about how sneakerheads have found identity through sneakers.

Sneakerhead Locale

“There has always been a bit of a split between East Coast and West Coast when it comes to sneakers. I grew up on Long Island in New York,” says Bengtson. “There has always been a lot of overlap between the two coasts, but you had shoes like the Chuck Taylors and the Nike Cortez that really make an impact on the West Coast.”

“The East Coast — especially New York — is different because a lot of people don’t have cars. Instead, your sneakers would really be where your status would come from. Maybe in California, you would get away with other things because you had a car. Your car would be your status,” Bengtson continued. “In New York, your shoes are your status. In this area, you’re dealing with subways and crowded streets. You gain respect from making sure your shoes don’t get stepped on and making sure your shoes don’t get taken. This doesn’t happen as often as it used to, but it was something significant. Shoes were something you’d protect and place quite a bit of value on.”

Team Love

“Before we talk about people, we have to talk about basketball programs, team colors, certain athletes being on certain teams, and how those things affect sneaker culture,” says Bengtson. “You would want powder blue Uptowns (Nike Air Force 1’s) because North Carolina was crushing teams. This was before the golden era, when everybody was rocking the starter jacket and the jersey, before the Mitchell & Ness phenomenon,” he explains. “Going back to my childhood, it was about watching North Carolina and Duke, watching UCLA, wearing the powder blue and maize, or any other colorway. It was about Boston College, wearing the burgundy and mustard.”

Although individual endorsements weren’t popular during this time, it was standard practice for college teams to have endorsements deals. As a result, teams and brands were closely affiliated. “North Carolina had the weapons and all of the emerging styles under Converse. Georgetown had the Hoya Nikes — the midnight blue with the smoke gray,” recalls Bengtson. “With college basketball teams, you had the particular colors of their uniforms all the way to brand Jordan. All of a sudden, you had these college teams’ colors on everybody’s feet around the way.”

The Price of Being a Sneakerhead

“When sneakers would get popular, it wasn’t always just because of who was wearing them. In some cases, it would even be about how expensive they were,” Bengtson remembers. “You can look at something like the Adidas Forum, which didn’t have any player associated with it. Players wore it, but it wasn’t necessarily a signature model. However, people still wanted it because of how expensive it was.”

For sneakerheads, price and exclusivity adds to allure. “A lot of these brands that didn’t necessarily make a lot of noise in other spaces were able to have an impact because of the price tag and because of the status that the shoe gave you, says Bengtson. “When it really comes down to it, in a lot of places, the sneakers you wear are a lot more meaningful than just being a pair of shoes. They say a lot about what you value and what you identify with, and they have a real effect on the way other people view you.”

You can learn more about the history and future of the sneaker industry by exploring Yellowbrick’s Sneaker Essentials online course.

A Grail sneaker in the sneaker industry refers to that one sneaker that you would basically give up all of your other sneakers for. It is the crown jewel of your collection. Whether you have it or you don’t have it, it is that one piece that defines you as a sneaker collector and defines your collection.

Back in the day you would have to go through a lot of things to acquire your Grail. That could mean reaching out to someone overseas, searching in basements, or really wild things you probably wouldn’t have to do anymore. People would do it, though, because that one piece would define your collection and would define you as a collector. It’s the same as an art collector going after a rare or interesting piece of art. A Grail should mean something to you.

“Grail” is very loosely used nowadays in sneaker education or online sneaker education, but when it’s in its purest form, the stories mattered because that was a sneaker that you would go through great lengths to acquire. Nowadays, that’s made it a little easier because if you have enough money, you can get it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.