How An Interview On CBC And Some Math Turned Into $1,350 For Our Team
You may not know it, but some people go crazy for sneakers! So much so, there is even a “stock exchange” for buying and selling and tracking the value of sneakers called StockX. StockX’s last valuation round placed the company’s value at $1.1-Billion.
Just for a day, we thought we would get into the craze! It all started when driving into work on a Saturday listening to CBC radio. The host was interviewing a local skate shop called Top of the World, that was lucky enough to have received 30 pairs of Nike’s SB Dunk Travis Scott limited edition sneakers. Don’t know who Travis Scott is? Neither did we. His claim to fame is that he dated Kylie Jenner.
The general manager at Top of the World mentioned that most often when sneakers of this status get released, people line up for days, however, many people do not have that opportunity. He wanted to do something different and have a raffle for the opportunity to buy the shoes.
Our team are all finance people, so we went to work trying to figure out our odds: 30 pairs of shoes, we estimated 100-200 people and only four of us. We thought the odds were good enough for us to take a break from our special project and make our way over to the store. When we arrived, we realized our assumptions were wrong, there were at least 500 people there, but with four raffle tickets in hand, we decided to stay.
Sure enough, our number was pulled for the 25th pair of shoes. We lined up with all the other winners to have the opportunity to spend $220 to buy the sneakers while resisting the multiple offers that we got while in line. “I’ll give you $1,200” says one, “that offer is too low” says another, “I’ll give you $1,300”. Fortunately, we had someone on our team that has a brother who is into sneakers. For the rest of the day we tracked the highs and lows of the “Sneaker Exchange” and finally decided it was time to cash in. By the end of the day, our team was $1,100 richer and we had learned a lot about the world of trading sneakers.
You may not know it, but some people go crazy for sneakers! So much so, there is even a “stock exchange” for buying and selling and tracking the value of sneakers called StockX. StockX’s last valuation round placed the company’s value at $1.1-Billion.
Just for a day, we thought we would get into the craze! It all started when driving into work on a Saturday listening to CBC radio. The host was interviewing a local skate shop called Top of the World, that was lucky enough to have received 30 pairs of Nike’s SB Dunk Travis Scott limited edition sneakers. Don’t know who Travis Scott is? Neither did we. His claim to fame is that he dated Kylie Jenner.
The general manager at Top of the World mentioned that most often when sneakers of this status get released, people line up for days, however, many people do not have that opportunity. He wanted to do something different and have a raffle for the opportunity to buy the shoes.
Our team are all finance people, so we went to work trying to figure out our odds: 30 pairs of shoes, we estimated 100-200 people and only four of us. We thought the odds were good enough for us to take a break from our special project and make our way over to the store. When we arrived, we realized our assumptions were wrong, there were at least 500 people there, but with four raffle tickets in hand, we decided to stay.
Sure enough, our number was pulled for the 25th pair of shoes. We lined up with all the other winners to have the opportunity to spend $220 to buy the sneakers while resisting the multiple offers that we got while in line. “I’ll give you $1,200” says one, “that offer is too low” says another, “I’ll give you $1,300”. Fortunately, we had someone on our team that has a brother who is into sneakers. For the rest of the day we tracked the highs and lows of the “Sneaker Exchange” and finally decided it was time to cash in. By the end of the day, our team was $1,100 richer and we had learned a lot about the world of trading sneakers.
