This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hello, hello, greetings. What's up, welcome back. It's Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School, bringing you stories every day of people creating a little bit more freedom and also some extra money, that's good too, for themselves. Today's story is about a guy who has been buying and selling sneakers since he was 10 years old. Now he's an adult, but he's still doing the same thing.
The story is about that classic business model of buy low, sell high. This model's not going anywhere. It's how I got my start 20 years ago, not buying and selling sneakers, but learning how I could buy things and then resell them for a profit. I'll tell you all about how this guy does it after this quick shout out to our sponsor. [Music]
Chris Cassidy has been obsessed with sneakers since he was 10 years old.
When the rest of his peers were playing video games, trading baseball cards or watching cartoons, he'd be pestering his dad to take him to the mall to look at shoes. But even then, he wasn't looking for the sweetest kicks to stand out in the schoolyard. Instead, he'd found a way to turn a profit. Stumbling across a rare pair of shoes in his local mall, Chris used $125 of money that he'd saved up to buy the shoes for himself. But instead of wearing them, he took them home, put them up on eBay, and within five minutes, he'd sold them for $325.
As a 10-year-old, he thought that was pretty cool and spent the rest of his pre-adolescent free time trying to replicate that success. Years later, Chris still employs the same business model. He now has his own e-commerce website, 513kicks, which references his area code in Cincinnati, Ohio. He's got a day job, so he just does this on the side, and he was able to start this hustle for just $250. That was spent on his domain, web host, some shipping costs, and paid social media advertisements.
This is an investment he's long seen a return on, averaging about $1,000 a month in profit, month after month, and even year after year. His goal with a pair of sneakers is always to double his investment. If he's gonna spend $50 on a pair of sneakers, he wants to be confident he can make $100 when it comes time to sell them. It would be possible to work at lower profit margins, but he says it's not worth the time and effort that goes into it. Chris sources his sneakers in much the same way as when he was younger.
He spends hours working his way through brick-and-mortar stores, both retail and thrift shops, to find exclusive sneakers he knows he can flip for a profit. He also has alerts and social media updates set up to notify him when his favorite boutique shops start their sales, allowing him to, well, buy low and sell high. Upon occasion, he's gone to some extreme lengths to acquire the best possible products to sell. When Kanye West released his first ever line of three shoes with Nike, before later switching to Adidas, Chris drove down to Louisville, Kentucky and slept outside in order to purchase a pair first thing in the morning. He managed to acquire his next two pairs through other channels for a total investment of $745, and he later sold them for more than $4,000.
Chris works for a large marketing firm, which has allowed him to tap into a wealth of knowledge to bring his side hustle to his customers. But he also thinks this process is simple and easy enough for anyone to replicate. When 513kix went live, for example, he emailed everyone in his network and asked them to help share it, finding him a bunch of visitors and views on the first day. In order to get more consistent traffic, he spent the rest of his time focusing on building a presence in Google and growing his social media following. He also makes sure his site's content is constantly updated, optimized with title tags, meta descriptions, and that he's generating new links to point back to his site.
This has allowed him to increase the amount of shoes he can sell to buyers outside of his usual network and increase the number of people who are finding his brand organically. For anyone looking to enter a similar industry, Chris says it's paramount to know your product and what your buyer is looking for. You have to be flexible to what the market wants, not just your own taste. Looking to the future, Chris wants to increase awareness of 513kix and use the money he's making to invest in new pairs so he can update his stock daily. [Music]
There is a market for anything that sells at different prices in different channels, like you see from this story, or where supply and demand are simply not matched, which also comes through from this story.
There's just not enough Yeezy shoes out there and plenty of other models too. Now the sneaker manufacturers know this and part of what they're trying to do with these popular products is to increase demand and deliberately not make enough to accommodate that demand. So in some situations, the industry itself may frown upon reselling and try to stop it. But for something like this, it's almost like they want that market to exist and they're seemingly happy that people like Chris are doing this. I actually met a teenager at our Phoenix event recently who's doing a version of this too.
Like I said, it reminds me of my early days. And if you like the concept and haven't done any side hustling before, the barrier to entry is very low. You just need to pick a market of something that you know a bit about or can easily learn about and find either that mismatch of supply and demand or just something that sells for different prices in different channels. So here Chris is going to thrift shops and retail stores looking for certain models that he knows he can sell elsewhere for a higher price. There's all kinds of things you can do this with.
So in the longterm, it's just a question of how much does it scale? How can you pick a product that has a good enough profit margin to make it worth it? 'Cause if you buy something for $10 then resell it for $11. Technically you've made a profit but not really anything significant. So I like Chris's vision of not buying anything that he doesn't feel confident he can resell for twice the price.
Side hustlers, friends, listeners, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/290. We'll link up 5.13 kicks, any other references about reselling or anything else I mentioned. And if you are reselling something, I would love to know about it. Let me know, send me a quick little voice note or just an email note, podcast@sidehustleschool.com.
We'll be reading out some responses in a future episode. You can also call the Hustle Hotline at 8449 Hustle. That's 844-948-7853 and leave a quick message. Thank you as always for listening. You're a rock star.
I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]
