The death of basketball star Kobe Bryant is rippling through the memorabilia market, with buyers and sellers alike storming stores and online markets hoping to snag one last piece of his legacy. The sneaker market spiked particularly quickly.
“Pretty much the same day that he passed, everything we had available was just gone,” said Candace Gray, a salesperson at Shoe Palace on Melrose Avenue in mid-city Los Angeles.
“That following morning we got hit very hard with a lot of people hoping to grab what they could as far as remembrance,” she said.
But while some shoppers were in it for the sentiment, others were just looking to make a quick buck by flipping the shoes online. On one website, shoes made famous by Bryant began selling for well over double what they were just hours before.
Not uncommon, says Robert Digisi at the Wharton School.
“When a celebrity dies, whether it be sports, a musician, an actor, an actress, whatever that might be, there is certainly a lot of human sentiment involved and that will spike demand,” he said. “And the market isn’t necessarily ready for that.”
That spike can lead to higher prices on a range of items, from jerseys to t-shirts, and posters to trading cards.
But Digisi says the spike is just that — prices level out over time. That means both dealers and fans must choose whether to sell now or hold on.
Honoring Kobe’s memory
At secondhand sneaker shop Cool Kicks, also in mid-city, co-owners Adeel Shams and Davon Artis chose to hold onto them. The store stocked several models, released over Bryant’s career. Minutes after news of Bryant’s death, the two pulled them from the shelves.
“We felt like all the resellers would hurry up and come to the store and take all of the items and try to make money off his name and we were opposed to that,” Shams said.
Artis says they pulled the shoes just in time.
“After we took everything off the shelf, everyone wants to come in either looking for an item or they wanna sell an item they have to profit off because [they] see a market that’s going increasingly crazy now too,” he said.
Shams and Artis say they have more than 100 pairs of Kobe Bryant-associated shoes at the shop.
Bryant’s fanbase in China and Europe made him an international figure. That translates to a world of collectors and fans hoping to get their hands on a dwindling number of relics — now priced out of reach for the average sneakerhead. Shams points to a red pair of Kobe 1 Protros.
“We had it reselling at $750, and now that I’m looking at it, the closest shoe in this size is a 9-and-a-half going for $12,000,” he said.
But Shams and Artis don’t plan to sell anytime soon. When they do, they say they’ll likely donate their profits to the Mamba on Three fund, which was founded in the wake of Bryant’s death by his wife, Vanessa.
The two aren’t the only ones putting passion over profit. Candace Gray, at Shoe Palace, doesn’t just sell Kobe gear: she collects it herself. She doesn’t plan to sell her collection of shoes and jerseys either.
“They are going to go into glass,” she said. “I don’t want to have to worry about not having something that my kids can have tangible to be able to explain the magnitude of who Kobe Bryant was.”
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