I closed the Spring/Summer State of Sneakers by saying the most important number in footwear for the back half of 2026 was whether Nike’s gross margin stopped sliding.

It stopped.

Nike’s first quarter of fiscal 2027 came in with gross margin at 42.8 percent, up 60 basis points from a year ago. If you had told me that in June, I would have expected the whole industry’s score to climb with it. And then I read the rest of the release... revenue down 4 percent, Greater China down 26 percent on a currency-neutral basis, Converse down 28 percent, and a full-year outlook calling for revenue to decline high-single digits.

I was watching the right company. I was watching the wrong line.

The Fall/Winter edition of the report is coming, and I’m going to wait for Nike’s December quarter before I publish it. Nike carries nearly 40 percent of the dollar weight in my model, and scoring the industry without its newest number would be like grading a season before the last game. Between now and then, a lot of the industry reports. Here are the four numbers I’m watching most closely, and what each one would change.

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I miss lacing my shoes with my phone.

That’s a strange sentence to write, and I know how it sounds. But I wear my Nike Adapt Huaraches all the time, and I miss opening the app to tighten them and change the color of the lights. Nobody needed that feature. I still miss it.

I’m biased here, and I’ll own up to it. I hosted Outside The Box for a few years with the world’s most trusted sneaker creator, Jacques Slade, and Tiffany Beers, the former Nike engineer who led the work that made power laces real. We talked about self-lacing shoes more than any three people probably should have. So when I sat down to make a video about the Nike MAG, I expected to tell a fun story about a movie prop.

It turned into something else.

A Joke About The Future

In 1989, Tinker Hatfield was asked to design a sneaker for the year 2015, for a movie that was mostly a comedy. Light-up panels, a glowing strap, laces that tightened on their own. None of it worked. It didn’t have to.

Then Nike spent the next twenty six years trying to make the joke true. I put the full timeline together on SneakerHistory.com. It filed an auto-lacing patent in 2008 with Hatfield and Beers named on it. It made 1,500 pairs of the MAG in 2011 and auctioned every one of them for the Michael J. Fox Foundation. On October 21st, 2015, it sent Michael J. Fox the first pair that laced itself. In 2016 it made 89 more and gave them away through a $10 raffle for the same foundation. Between 2011 and 2016, those shoes raised more than sixteen million dollars for Parkinson’s research.

No business plan in the world asks for that shoe. It was expensive, impractical and nearly impossible to build. And it gave Nike one of the best stories in its history.

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So I'm asking.

A few quick questions about what you read The Sneaker Newsletter for, what you want more of, and how often you want to hear from…

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One thing I've been thinking about a lot, and haven't dug into here yet, is Kylian Mbappé signing with On.

The detail I couldn't get past when the news broke was the age. Eight years old.

That's how old Kylian Mbappé was when his relationship with Nike started. On September 18, he walked away from it and signed with On, a Swiss brand founded in 2010 that has never sold a football boot.

His Nike deal expired on July 31 and wasn't renewed. Over nearly two decades he got 12 signature boots, and Nike built a big piece of its post-Ronaldo football marketing around him, including this summer's World Cup.

Most of the coverage went straight to the scoreboard. Nike lost its biggest football star, On won the news cycle, and somebody's stock chart is supposed to settle it.

I think the scoreboard misses what was traded. Mbappé didn't leave for a bigger check. He left for a boot nobody has seen yet and a stake in the company that's going to make it.

What On Put On The Table

On's first commercial football boots aren't due until 2027. Thierry Henry was part of the launch, too. On named him Director of Football, said he'd been working behind the scenes on the project since late 2025, and put him in the campaign alongside Mbappé and Swiss international Sydney Schertenleib, shot by Juergen Teller at On Labs in Zurich. "Building something new in football requires a bold and original approach," Henry said in the announcement. He also played a real part in bringing Mbappé over, and a few days later he was on CNBC calling Mbappé's role in product development "very important." On told CNN the agreement includes both cash and equity, and Mbappé will work directly with the product teams on footwear and apparel. He's already wearing prototypes in matches, well before anything hits shelves.

His own words point the same direction. "From the start, what attracted me to On was the opportunity to build something completely new together that will help shape the game of tomorrow."

Read that structure again. Nobody pays a 27-year-old at his peak to wear an unreleased boot for the logo exposure. What he bought was authorship and a piece of the outcome.

The First Two Weeks

The prototype wasn't ready for his first match after the announcement. Two days later, in the Madrid derby against Atlético, Mbappé wore whiteout Nike Mercurial Superfly 11s with the Swoosh covered. You could still tell what they were from the soleplate and the Air Zoom unit. Players almost never debut a new boot in a game that size, and On's boot wasn't a finished product yet.

Nike didn't say a word publicly. Instead, a near-identical whiteout Mercurial showed up as a Nike By You preset for $325. That's about as quiet, and as pointed, as a brand response gets.

It's worth remembering what Nike was walking away from. In August it released a player-edition Superfly 11 honoring his World Cup record. On our World Cup boot tracker at becausesneakers, Mbappé sits at the top of the list with 10 goals, every one of them scored in Superfly 11s.

Then came the debut. On September 25, against Turkey in the Nations League, Mbappé wore the On prototype in a match for the first time, an all-white boot with a sprayed LightSpray upper and ON-DCPT-KM010 printed on the outstep. He scored in the 54th minute. Minutesd later he went down holding his left knee, and he was off by the hour mark. Zidane didn't dress it up afterward. "Unfortunately, it does not look good."

Real Madrid diagnosed a hyperextension of the posterior capsule of his left knee, roughly two weeks out, and he missed the rest of France's window. By the next morning, Goal was asking whether the new boots were to blame.

There's a strange wrinkle in all of this too. Nike still supplies the French national team, on a contract that runs through 2034. So that goal in Izmit came with a Swoosh on his chest and a boot nobody can buy on his feet...

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The Air Jordan 11 “Space Jam” had never been sold before. Michael Jordan wore the black and royal pair on screen in 1996, and Nike didn’t release it until the retro landed on December 13, 2000, at $125. The story, which has been told so many times it might as well be folklore, is that enough parents complained about kids cutting class that Nike started moving its big launches to Saturdays. Whether that’s the whole reason or not, the takeaway has held up for a quarter century. When Jordan Brand puts out an 11 in December, people change their plans.

I’ve been thinking about that Wednesday a lot this week, because the Space Jam 11 is coming back again, this time for the film’s 30th anniversary. And I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say this is the most important sneaker story on Nike’s calendar right now.

Not because it’ll sell out. It will. They all do in time, whether that takes ten minutes or ten weeks and a trip through the outlets. With the 11, the question has never been if it sells out. It’s how.

It matters more this time because of where Nike is right now, and because of what Nike’s own CEO said about Jordan retros ten days ago.

A quick note before I go any further. Jordan Brand’s media team set up a call for me with Terrance Harvey, Senior Manager for Jordan Retro Footwear, and Liv Bolung, Senior Manager of Streetwear Men’s Apparel Design at Global Jordan, to walk through the collection before it was announced. Nobody paid me, I didn’t get shoes, and nobody asked me to write this. A good part of what follows comes from that conversation, and I’ll tell you when it does.

The Shoe That Carries Christmas

You know how the holiday calendar has worked for most of the last two decades. There are a lot of releases. And then there’s the 11.

Tinker Hatfield designed the Air Jordan 11 for Michael’s return from baseball, and the original “Concord” released in 1995 during the season the Bulls went 72-10. Patent leather on a basketball shoe was a strange idea at the time. It turned into the most recognizable silhouette Jordan Brand has ever made, the one people wear with a suit, the one that shows up at proms and weddings and funerals.

The retros started in 2000 and 2001. By the late 2000s, the December 11 had become a near-annual tradition, and it turned into the release that every retailer planned their holiday around. Then the tradition got big enough to become a news story outside of sneakers. When the “Concord” came back in December 2011, shoppers were trampled and a mall door was ripped off its hinges in Indianapolis, and arrests were reported in at least a dozen cities. Retailers hadn’t asked for extra security because nobody expected it.

That’s the cultural side. The business side is even more telling.

When the “Space Jam” came back for its 20th anniversary in December 2016, Nike Brand president Trevor Edwards went on the earnings call that March and called it “the largest and most successful shoe launch in the history of Nike.” The pair it passed to take that title was the “72-10” 11 from the year before. Three years later, the “Bred” 11 from December 2019 was widely reported as Nike’s biggest release ever, and Nike’s COO said it sold out on SNKRS in 28 minutes.

Read those back. The 11 isn’t one release among many. It’s the shoe Nike has repeatedly pointed to on its own earnings calls when it wanted to show investors the brand was healthy. For most of the last decade, the December 11 has been the load-bearing wall of Nike’s holiday.

And for most of that decade, the way you measured an 11 was simple. How many pairs, and how fast did they go.

Hold onto that, because that’s the part that’s about to change.

Where Nike Is Right Now

I wrote about Nike’s first quarter last week, so I won’t rebuild the whole thing here. The short version is that it’s been a rough fall for Beaverton.

Revenue was $11.2 billion for the quarter, down 4%. Converse was down 28%. Greater China was down 26%. Nike told investors to expect full-year revenue to fall at a high-single-digit rate, rolled out a multiyear cost program it’s calling Pace, and said more roles will be cut along the way. The stock fell hard the next morning, and by the end of the week it was trading around $32, the lowest level in 12 years, down from roughly $175 at its 2021 peak. Nike’s market value and earnings have more than halved since Elliott Hill came back as CEO two years ago.

Jordan Brand is right in the middle of it. Jordan was about 13% of Nike’s business last quarter, and its revenue fell at a mid-teens rate. On the call, Hill named it alongside sportswear and China as the parts of the business holding everything else back.

Then he said the line that every person who has ever worked in sneaker retail has been waiting years to hear out loud.

“Simply put, we’ve been oversupplying our iconic retro product, asking them to do too much.”

Nike is cutting the volume and frequency of Jordan retro launches, especially in North America, with the full effect expected in 2027. Hill put the goal in one sentence. “When consumers see the Jumpman, it should feel special.”

You know what I mean when I say this isn’t the first time. Nike ran almost the same play nearly a decade ago, after overproduction left too many retros sitting on shelves. The difference is that in 2017 Nike was still growing. In 2026, it’s trying to stop shrinking, and it has an Investor Day on November 16 and 17 where it has to convince Wall Street the plan is working.

So here is the question that sits underneath this entire holiday.

What happens when the company admits it’s been oversupplying retros, and the biggest retro of the year is already on the calendar?

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I know people on the other end of those numbers. So I want…

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That isn’t a complaint. It’s what happens when two people are both building something on the side of something else. When we finally sat down for the Sneaker History podcast, it was worth every missed call.

If you don’t know Rick’s name, that’s part of the story. He spent more than twenty years insi…

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Four hundred and forty thousand, fifty-five dollars, for a pair of Shohei Ohtani’s game-used New Balance cleats from the Tokyo Series. It made the rounds, broke a game-used footwear record that had belonged to Michael Jordan, and put an exclamation point on something I wrote a while back, that baseball was quietly the most overlooked market in sneakers. A baseball player, in cleats, taking a number off of MJ. That story tells itself, which is exactly why it traveled as far as it did.

So I am not going to spend your morning relitigating the gavel. It is settled, it is loud, and it is the easy read. Also, my prediction of $444,444 was almost spot on.

The story I keep thinking about is the one that did not trend.

A few weeks before that auction closed, Jordan Brand did something much quieter, and if you were not watching Japanese baseball or a couple of deep-cut accounts, it slid right past you. They put the Yomiuri Giants, the Tokyo Giants, in player-exclusive Air Jordan 11 cleats. A floral bandana print across the mudguard, a ruby Jumpman on the heel, worn on the field at the Tokyo Dome. Not a general release. Not a hype drop with a countdown. Player exclusives, for a baseball team, in Japan.

The auction is what the timeline is chewing on. The cleats are what I would tell you to actually watch.

The interesting part was never the price. A one-of-one game-worn artifact from the best player alive was always going to be expensive. What tells me more is a decision that had a boardroom behind it. Somebody at Jordan Brand looked at the 11, arguably the crown jewel of the whole line, and decided the right place to put it, quietly, as a player exclusive, was on the feet of a team in Tokyo.

Brands do not put their best silhouette and their scarcest tier where the money is. They put it where the influence is.

That tells us where this story goes next…

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I paid for them with money from a freshly cashed check from umpiring little league games.

While I was there I bought a matching Nike shirt, store brand basketball shorts, and black socks with a royal blue Swoosh. First “fit” I ever bought as an outfit, unless you count a matching Dickies shirt and pants, which I do not, that’s my uniform.

I knew one person who worked at that store, in a different department. They weren’t working the day the check came in. It didn’t matter. Nobody there made commission and I had no patience.

Thirty years later I can tell you the size, the socks, the shorts, where the money came from, and exactly which shoe I settled for. I cannot tell you the name or the face of whoever walked to the back and came out with the box. I don’t remember who rang me up.

That is not an indictment of the Gart Sports in Colorado Springs. It never stocked the shoe I actually wanted, but it sold me the one I could afford, and the transaction worked.

But look at what happened after. The Lambaste has become the shoe I want back in retro form more than any other, with the Air Gone sitting second if you’re curious. People in this community know it well enough that I get texts when a pair surfaces on eBay. My friend Andrew even found a Lambaste 2 in my size and surprised me with them.

So the shoe took on a whole life. The store made a receipt.

For a lot of us the catalog was the other version of this. A stack of pages kept under the bed like contraband, circles around shoes were (almost) as good as purchases when it came to sharing with friends. No need for an order form, a phone number, or another person in the whole transaction at all. We couldn’t afford a single one but we were still a part of the story.

Plenty of you have the same story with a different model number. And plenty of you have the second half of it too, the part where you cannot picture the person who handed you the box. In an oversized store that is normal, and for most of the last thirty years it was fine.

In 2026 it is the opposite of what people want when they are about to spend $150 on shoes.

Which is why the most interesting thing any large retailer did this year happened on a Saturday morning on Slauson Avenue, and almost nobody covering the earnings wrote a word about it.

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Because I asked them to. I wanted to shoot photos of this pair, and I wanted to write this.

Collaborations have taken a beating over the last few years, mostly because there have been so many of them. The “collabs are dead” take shows up in my feed every week. I don’t buy it for a second, and I have not for a while.

What people are actually tired of is the same person telling the same story on a different shoe. That is a real problem and it deserves the criticism. It is also not the same thing as collaboration being finished. Any time somebody declares a part of this business dead, it is worth asking whether they are describing the whole category, the four accounts they follow, or their own interests.

Years ago I watched an influencer say that full camouflage should never be used on sneakers, in a post about another brand’s collab. A little over a year later they released a full camouflage shoe with a competitor.

This collection landed in early July. The GEL-Nimbus 28 at $180 in a sunset orange, and the GEL-Challenger 15 tennis shoe at $130 with FP Movement’s paisley across it. It is FP Movement’s first footwear partnership. It sells through FP Movement, through ASICS, and through select Dick’s stores, which is how the pair ended up on my table.

If FP Movement is not a name you carry around, that is sort of the point. It is Free People’s activewear arm, which makes it part of URBN, the same company that owns Anthropologie and Urban Outfitters. It sells leggings and sports bras and tennis skirts to a customer who came in for the clothes, and it has been opening stores at a pace most footwear brands would envy. Until this summer it had never put its name on a shoe.

The sneaker read on something like this is usually dismissive. No local shop attached. No hype name. Nothing to line up for.

I look at it and see the most useful kind of collaboration in the business right now, and the reason has nothing to do with the shoe.

It has to do with which of these two companies is actually the small one, and I had that wrong until I went and looked.

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I was at Complex when Complex acquired Sole Collector, my former employer. So I got to watch a company I had bled for become a line item in somebody else’s org chart, from inside the company doing the acquiring. Later, at Stadium Goods, our parent company Farfetch was acquired by Coupang. Different scale, different decade, same feeling in the building. There is a version of that news that gets written up in an afternoon, and there is a version the people living it understand, and they are almost never the same story.

That is most of what I have been thinking about this week.

The facts first. On August 25, Dick’s reported its second quarter, the thirteen weeks ended August 1. Consolidated net sales of $5.59 billion, up 53.2 percent, which is what happens when a company the size of Foot Locker shows up in your reporting for a full half. The Dick’s business comped up 4.9 percent. The Foot Locker business comped down 3.6 percent on a proforma basis and posted a $31.9 million operating loss for the quarter. Full year guidance for the Foot Locker segment moved from a profit of $110 to $150 million to a loss of $40 to $80 million. The stock fell more than 30 percent that day, the worst single session in the company’s history.

That does not look good. I am not going to pretend otherwise, and neither did they.

The dominant take showed up before the call was even over. Dick’s overpaid for a mall business in decline, the $2.5 billion they closed on last September was a mistake, and this quarter is the proof.

I don’t see it that way. I think they bought it at a good price. I also think they bought it at one of the hardest moments in thirty years to own a business like this, and those two things are not in conflict.

Go back five months. In March, Dick’s publicly pulled back on the store closures it had planned, because an eleven store remodel pilot called Fast Break was outcomping the Dick’s business and improving gross margin while it did it. Ed Stack said out loud that stores he had been prepared to write off could be made very profitable instead. By spring the plan had scaled toward roughly 250 remodels by back to school, with assortment cut about 30 percent to focus the wall. In the first quarter, Foot Locker returned to comp sales growth and to profitability, up 0.6 percent, and the company raised its full year outlook on the strength of it.

That is not a business coming apart. That is a business that had finally started moving.

So something changed between March and August, and it was not the real estate, and it was not the operators, and it was not the remodels. Part of it Stack named on the call. The rest of it I paid for at the grocery store this week.

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The brief came from Michael Jordan, and it was one sentence long.

He wanted the shoe to look like it was in motion while standing still.

Leo Chang, senior creative director for basketball and sport at Jordan Brand, told me that’s what they were working against. Not fast in the way a spec sheet is fast. Fast to look at. Sleek, cle…

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On the flip side of that, a lot of you reading this have heard me preach about how much opportunity there is in taking the skills, the strategies, and the mindset you have naturally honed in the sneaker world, and applying all of it to brands and businesses outside of this industry.

Today I want to walk through a real world example of that. Arc’teryx sent me the Konseal Trek, the most expensive shoe the brand has made. And as I was cutting the tape and lifting the lid, I noticed I wasn’t really thinking about the boot at all. I was thinking about why it was in my hands. (Here's the full unboxing if you want to see the boot in hand before we get into it.)

I am not a mountaineer. I live on the California coast. Arc’teryx proves its gear on the granite above Vancouver, cold and vertical and the kind of terrain that ends your day if your feet quit on you. So the obvious thing to do with a $280 mountain boot is send it to someone who lives on a mountain. They sent it to a guy who spent two decades inside sneaker companies.

The groupthink narrative on Arc’teryx right now is the one you’ve probably heard. Gorpcore went mainstream, the dead bird became the logo on every tech worker in the city, luxury outdoor is having its run. We’ve seen this before. You know the take. You have probably read a version of it. And there is nothing wrong with it, except that it stops exactly where the interesting part starts.

Because as I was photographing this boot, the thing that I kept thinking was not that a climbing brand crossed over into fashion. It is that a climbing brand from 1989, one that started making harnesses and chalk bags before it ever made a single piece of clothing, has quietly adopted the entire operating system that sneakers built.

To me that is the real story of the last twenty years, and almost nobody frames it this way. We keep asking whether sneakers are up or down, whether the resale market is cooling, whether the hype is over. Wrong altitude. The more honest question is what sneaker culture exported to the rest of the footwear industry while everyone was busy arguing about the scoreboard.

I’ll start with how this boot got to me, and then get to the real reason I am talking about it today…

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It showed up today. Not a proof, not a PDF, not a cover mockup in an email. The actual book… in my hands.

My first book. I have written a lot of words over the last two decades, but holding this one is a different feeling entirely. And it is real now.

My editor at Motorbooks, Jordan, left a note inside the f…

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While I was out, I kept seeing the same story cross my feed, so I wanted to address it. The trend of everyone declaring that resale is dead in 2026.

That’s shortsighted.

Yes, maybe the make-a-quick-buck-because-you-got-lucky-on-an-app version isn’t as prominent in sneakers right now. But that was never really what it was about for most people. Even the people we call resellers. Businesses ebb and flow because of thousands of tiny things that come together and push and pull apart, like waves. You can ride a wave in any business, whether it’s sneakers, or resale, or any other trend, but just like surfing, nothing lasts forever. The people who stay in business, aka the ones stubborn enough to get back up and paddle out for the next one, they know the game of selling or reselling was never about a single wave. It’s about staying in the ocean long enough to ride a lot of different ones.

The headlines don’t see it that way. Newsweek is asking if the whole market is crashing. Every reselling forum has a “should I even bother anymore” thread pinned to the top. The number that used to double overnight now sits at retail, or under it, and everybody who showed up in 2020 to flip a pair of Dunks for rent money is writing the eulogy on their way out the door.

I’d get a lot more clicks if I told you reselling sneakers is dead. That’s the post everyone wants to share right now, the clean little obituary you can nod along to on your way out. It’s also wrong, and I’ve been in this too long to write it just because it would travel.

What that crowd is missing is the same thing they missed on the way up. The spike they’re mourning was the anomaly. Not the baseline.

I was employee #9 at StockX. I had a front-row seat to the exact machinery that everyone now blames for “killing” resale, and I want to tell you what it was actually built to do, because it did its job, and the result looks a lot like what people are calling a crash...

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I keep taking photos in the dark, trying to catch the glow. Then turning the flash on to find the reflective hits I would have walked right past in da…

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I was a kid in the back of my grandparents’ Oldsmobile, headed from Sacramento to San Francisco with my dad and my grandparents for a Giants game. That drive is normally ninety minutes, maybe two hours if the traffic on the way into the city decides to be difficult. We left early on purpose, because the plan w…

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This is one of those thoughts that showed up while I was doing something completely unrelated, refused to leave, and eventually earned its way into your inbox. No big thesis today. Just a thing I keep turning over, and you’re the people who’ll actually get why. I guess, if you don’t think about sneakers obsessively and in this way, congra…

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When I wrote about the Memphis warehouse case yesterday, I figured I was done thinking about people stealing from Nike for a while. Then this one landed, and it wouldn’t leave me alone, because it’s the same disease showing up at the complete opposite end of the building.

If you read the Memphis story, you’ll remember the shape of it. Warehouse workers, a floor manager, hourly people surrounded all day by more product than they’d see in a lifetime, and a shipping label as the only lock on the door. The temptation there was structural. I said as much. When the value moving past you has nothing to do with the wage you take home, the math gets loud.

This one is different, and that’s exactly why it’s bothering me.

Prosecutors have charged John Griffith, who ran Nike’s global brand marketing for music supervision, strategy and licensing, a role he’d held since 2007. Alongside a licensing consultant named Brad Mosher, he’s accused of inflating the prices Nike paid for music licensing work, then routing roughly half of the overpayments back to himself through a shell company. More than a million dollars, across about two and a half years, through at least eleven transactions. Each man is facing two dozen felony counts, from racketeering to aggravated theft to money laundering.

Think about that for a second. This wasn’t a man surrounded by product he couldn’t afford. This was a man who controlled a budget, picked the vendors, set the prices, and had done it long enough to be trusted completely. Almost twenty years in the role. The keys weren’t stolen. They were handed to him.

So the question the Memphis case raised quietly, this one asks at full volume. Why. When you are already that high, already that established, already that successful by every measure the industry hands out... why reach for the thing that can take all of it away?

I’ve been in and around enough rooms in this business to have a theory… and it isn’t a flattering one.

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It’s hard for me to understand how someone who actually loves sneakers... loves being around them, loves the people in this community, loves the people in this business, loves the work itself... ends up choosing to do some of the things the people in this story chose to do. I’ve been building things in this space for decades, and if there is one thing I know for certain, it’s that there are no shortcuts to putting in the work. I say that as someone still building it right now, through the ups and the downs. You just keep moving forward.

So I didn’t want to write this one. I’m writing it anyway, because the part that matters isn’t the crime. It’s who ends up paying for it.

I’ve spent a good chunk of my career inside the buildings where product actually moves. Distribution centers. Authentication floors. The back rooms of shops, back before reselling sneakers had back rooms worth naming. So when this one crossed my desk this week, I didn’t read it the way most of the timeline is reading it.

Most of the timeline is reading it as a heist.

Federal prosecutors just indicted twelve people for allegedly diverting more than two million dollars in Nike product out of the company’s Memphis distribution center between July 2021 and June 2024. The mechanism was almost insultingly simple. Insiders on the warehouse floor identified cartons worth taking, put unauthorized UPS labels on them, and let Nike’s own logistics network carry the boxes to addresses that had nothing to do with Nike. Roughly 3,119 labels over three years. UPS was the unwitting mule. The shoes just... left. Through the dock door, on the truck, the exact same way legitimate product leaves every single day.

Look at how the roles break down, because the shape of it matters.

According to the indictment, floor manager Michael Perkins allegedly distributed labels to four warehouse employees who attached them to cartons. Two men outside the building manufactured the labels at volume... Roy Lee Harvey Jr., operating as RHJ Global, is accused of creating around 1,860 of them, and Keith Cannon, working under the name Valid Kixx, another 1,259. Then the product needed somewhere to land. That’s where the resale layer comes in. Bereket Abraham, 39, a co-owner of CoolKicks on Melrose, allegedly paid $215,275 for shoes and let his store’s UPS equipment get used early in the scheme. Joel Deluna of Chicago Emporium allegedly moved $492,000 to Cannon. Jorge Cuellar, operating as Horhead Investments, allegedly sent $696,700 to a Cannon food truck business. And the merchandise was resold through GOAT and StockX and out the front of the shops, right alongside everything else.

The whole thing came apart because of weather. A 2024 snowstorm slowed things down enough that a Nike employee noticed fraudulent labels sitting on cargo that wasn’t supposed to be UPS. Supervisors called LAPD detectives they knew, flagged the LA addresses, and investigators started dropping tracking devices into shipments. The trackers walked them straight to the storefronts.

So that’s the anatomy. Twelve people, three years, three thousand labels, a two-million-dollar forfeiture demand, and a snowstorm as the accidental hero.

Everybody is going to fixate on CoolKicks. I understand why. It’s a name people know, a shop that built real goodwill in this community, a place that felt like ours. Watching a storefront like that show up in a federal indictment stings in a specific way.

But the boutique isn’t the part I keep coming back to.

What I keep coming back to is how easy the last mile of this crime was. Because stealing has never been the hard part of cargo theft. The hard part, historically, was always the selling. And the selling wasn’t hard at all.

If you've been in this game a while, this tension should feel familiar. Insider access rubbing up against the resale market is not new, and it hasn't only happened on warehouse floors. It reached the executive suite at Nike five years ago, in a story a lot of you know by name. Nobody there was accused of a crime. What happened next is the part I still can't stop thinking about.

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