Street fashion brands have roots that run deep within American street culture. Cultures evolve quickly, and these brands exist as a timeline of how our society dressed, acted, and behaved at different points in time. Putting on a recognizable brand shows an individual’s attempt to stand out, while expressing their true inner spirit. Beyond just being a fashion statement, brands can stylize your preference for music, sports, dance, or even ideologies, while representing sub-cultures that span multiple generations. In some respects, more deep-seated brands have the power to outweigh a person’s identity, where just owning a particular item is enough to become fused with the brand’s culture and mindset. Instead of the brand becoming an accessory to the people, the people become an accessory to the brand. In many segments of society, buying streetwear is unavoidable, it’s a prerequisite for existence.

From Past to Present

It’s generally believed that the street culture industry began to take shape with the American brand Stussy, created in the 1980s. Later on in the 90’s, brands such as Supreme, Thrasher, A Bathing Ape, Neighborhood, and Fragment Design came along, many of which are still marketable street fashion brands today. From the new millennium onwards, the United States and Japan have been dominating street fashion trends, and their influence has exploded around the globe.

Grand Opening of the new BAPE Paris store. Credit：HYPEBEAST

While original brands such as Stussy and Supreme were forged on more traditional street culture, the brands rising in popularity over the past decade have begun to build more bridges with the mainstream. Newer brands like Cav Empt, Off-white, and Kith focus on promoting a new era of youth subculture, starting from the preferences of a younger generation and their passion for music, art, and alternative lifestyles. In doing so, they are breaking down barriers and shattering preconceptions. These changes are also reflected by the fashion industry’s management strategies. For example, Off-white’s designer Virgil Abloh was quickly identified by Louis Vuitton, who handed him the role of artistic director for their menswear department. Edison Chen’s self-managed brand CLOT recently participated in New York Fashion Week, while Kanye West, Travis Scott and other Hip Hop superstars are collaborating with major sports apparel labels.

Off-white and Louis Vuitton’s Artistic Director Virgil Abloh. CREDIT：D’MARGE

Issues In the Industry

Where there are consumers, there is opportunity. Many street wear brands and their limited edition items are both blessed and cursed by scarcity, causing their value to skyrocket. Street fashion brands have been linked to a more speculative culture from the very beginning. When A Bathing Ape was founded, products were sold at astonishing prices because of the scarce production quantity. Supreme has seen customers lined up outside the store for a chance to grab unique items on its weekly sales days for the past two decades. Hardcore fans salivate over the Supreme Drop List, a weekly ritual of new releases. This ignited a market for secondhand goods, which led to the creation of offline resale stores for the early generation of fashion fans. Later on, as the internet rose to prominence, we saw the development of online trading forums, where early fans were astounded to see a pair of Neighborhood jeans sold for over 1,500 USD. As time went by, the Internet age continued to fuel this behavior, and without anyway to curb the problem, speculative prices began to plague the industry.

Supreme Shibuya store daily sale scene. CREDIT：HYPEBEAST

Another influential brand, Anti Social Social Club, has struggled to maintain their reputation due to supply shortages. Internal mis-management resulted in substandard delivery times, forcing some customers to wait half a year or more for their orders to arrive. Remarkably, some customers are still waiting for orders they placed in the year 2017.

These aren’t the only stumbling blocks for the industry. Supreme made the mistake of waiting too long to register trademarks outside the US, allowing copycat stores to emerge, leading to the deception of many consumers. Problems like this also occur with popular brands such as FR2 and Yeezy, and all products that are linked to streetwear brands can be burdened by these complications.

The Fake Supreme Store. CREDIT: The Unknown Vlogs

Digitizing Fashion Assets

In China, a popular saying this summer was that it’s “better to invest in cryptocurrency than the stock market, and even better to invest in sneakers than cryptocurrency.” The rise of secondary trading platforms for sneakers, led by StockX, has shown how lucrative the sneaker industry is today. With nearly 7 million users worldwide, StockX shook up the industry by merging eCommerce with elements of financial markets. It’s no wonder that people joke about how today’s youth are quickly learning a lot about finance through the buying and selling of sports shoes.

In the past, people had to go to stores and queue up all night, enduring a lottery-type experience in order to get a limited edition pair of shoes. Even if they planned to resell the sneakers later, they would have to physically get the shoes, before they could put the shoes in speculative shops or online auctions. Now, as long as you have access to enough money, you can buy and sell the “virtual shoes” in various secondary markets. This will allow you to monitor fluctuations and choose the right time to sell. One well-timed trade can net sellers thousands of dollars in profit. Amazingly, from buying to selling, you no longer need to touch a physical pair of shoes.

The “Sneaker K-line” was originally just a tool for fans to purchase their favorite styles at a reasonable price. However, today it has become an important criteria for speculators. Over the course of a transaction on this type of secondary platform, profit-chasing generated from resale has become the highest priority, extinguishing the love and interest in the culture, while setting traps for consumers and poisoning the market. These days, it’s impossible to guarantee the physical asset’s existence in the “sneaker futures” market, and identifying fake products while limiting malicious operations has become very challenging. It’s foolish to expect a sustainable future for the industry if the true passion for this culture is no longer respected, while consumers are left unprotected.

Webpage of StockX. CREDIT：StockX

Where Does SneakerCoin Fit in The Industry?

Whether it’s shoes, clothes, toys or other items in street culture, the so-called “sneaker futures” are only a bubble based on speculation. When the bubble inevitably pops, it could cause great harm to the reputation of the brands and people at the core of the culture. To ensure the healthy and reasonable pace of development, the industry is desperate for more guarantees. Blockchain’s own trustless mechanism can be instrumental in delivering more assurances. Blockchain technology can verify the history of streetwear items, finding new ways to bring products and data to the consumers.

SneakerCoin has taken the initiative to solve all this. By discovering and recognizing each person’s contribution and value in the street culture ecosystem, SneakerCoin’s innovative platforms can empower consumers and protect their interests, while encouraging them to actively participate, influence and even lead the sustainable development of the street culture industry.

Today, the battlefield for brand management is happening online, with each item being tokenized and traded as a virtual asset. This is a trend that is upheaving business models around the globe, and paving the way for a more seamless future. SneakerCoin uses encrypted NFC chips, tracked on the VeChainThor public blockchain, to bind each street culture item with a unique product ID. These NFC chips virtually eliminate the risk of being copied or tampered with, leading to a marketplace free of counterfeit goods.

This brings us to a future where:

1. There is no longer a risk of making uninformed purchases:

Turn on your phone and easily access authenticated information linked to the product. All the information is reliable, immutable, and tamper-proof.

2. We can say goodbye to counterfeiting:

The physical product is connected to the blockchain through chips and NFTs (non-fungible tokens), which become a real virtual asset. This is implemented through a one-to-one binding process between each NFT and physical product. The days of having 1000 pieces produced but 10,000 pieces sold are a thing of the past.

3. Surf an Internet with limited items.

Sneakers will become a digital asset spread across different platforms, and SneakerCoin will carry out the physical exchange of the corresponding objects, so that the interests of each participant can be guaranteed.

Enjoy street culture at no risk! Discover more possibilities including ownership-claims of your limited edition goods, raffles on the blockchain, and high-value community content creation and interaction all with SneakerCoin!. We’d like to welcome all participants to join, empower consumers, and create a sustainable street culture community together!

Stay tuned for more updates, where we will announce even more ways that SneakerCoin can make an impact in a society obsessed with fashion and culture!

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