The Hunt Never Died. It Just Moved Online.
eBay just spent $1.2 billion to reach Gen Z, and it says a lot about where sneaker culture is really headed.
I have to be honest with you about something before we get into the business analysis.
I spend more time on eBay than on any other app. Like… significantly more.
More than Instagram, more than YouTube, more than any of the dedicated sneaker platforms I’ve watched rise and fall over the years. I’m on there looking at sneakers, obviously, but also car parts, vintage automotive literature, old catalogs, nostalgic ephemera connected to whatever hobby has my attention that week
(it was woodworking tools this weekend, btw).
Funny enough, my first actual business was selling car parts on eBay, about 25 years ago. There is truly no other corner of the internet that scratches the itch the way eBay does. And I’ve been thinking about why that is for a long time.
It comes down to something I’d call the hunt.
If you’ve been following me for a while, you know I don’t really talk about sneakers the way most people in this space do. I’ve never been primarily motivated by hype, or heat, or what’s going up in value on the secondary market. What’s always driven me is the search itself, the stories and people within those sneakers, and the idea that there’s something out there you haven’t found yet, something the rest of the world has overlooked, and if you’re patient and curious enough, you’ll eventually turn it up. And if it’s really good, it gives you a great story to tell.
I grew up in that era, and I think it shaped everything about how I relate to this hobby.
When I moved to Los Angeles the first time, 12-15 years ago, I spent hours every week digging through the backstock at sporting goods stores. The kind of places that weren’t on anyone’s radar, stacked floor to ceiling with inventory that the internet hadn’t discovered yet. This was before StockX, before GOAT, before resale had become a structured market. If you wanted to find something special, you had to physically be there. You had to do the work. And that work had its own reward… the rush of sliding a box off a dusty shelf and finding something nobody else knew was sitting there.
When I moved to Brooklyn to work for Complex, that same instinct followed me across the country. I remember walking with Russ Bengtson on our lunch breaks to places like Paragon Sports, not because we necessarily needed anything, but just to see what was sitting on the discount tables. That was part of the culture for people who genuinely cared about shoes—not the media cycle, not the press releases, but the actual physical act of looking. On weekends, I’d wander to different boroughs or head out to Long Island specifically to find old sporting goods stores that had been left behind as consumers migrated online. Those places were like time capsules. Walk into the right one and you’d find New Balance models that had been sitting on shelves for a decade, or Nike styles that had completely slipped through the cultural cracks.
If you asked me to name the golden era of sneaker collecting… the period I’d point to if someone wanted to understand what made this hobby feel alive… it would be those years. Not because the shoes were better or the market was more interesting, but because the act of finding something felt like it meant something. The scarcity was real. The discovery was yours.
That era is largely gone now. The internet commodified the backstock. Sneaker Twitter and Instagram ensured that nothing could stay hidden for long. Every forgotten gem eventually gets its Grailed listing, its StockX page, its five-paragraph feature on a sneaker blog. The hunt got harder because more people were hunting, and the tools got better. The stores that used to be the source eventually figured out what they had, or closed before anyone got to them.
Except eBay never stopped feeling like that.
I know that sounds like a strange thing to say about a publicly traded corporation with hundreds of millions of listings. But eBay has a depth and a variety that nothing else on the internet replicates. The possibility of finding something that others have forgotten… that’s still alive there. You can spend an hour going down a rabbit hole of vintage track spikes, or find a pair of Jordans from an era nobody’s talking about, or stumble onto a listing from someone’s estate sale that includes three pairs of deadstock tennis shoes from 1987 that the algorithm hasn’t priced yet. That’s the closest thing to the sporting goods store backstock experience that exists in 2026.
To me, that signals exactly why this eBay acquisition of Depop matters in ways that go beyond the business fundamentals. And it’s why I’ve been turning this deal over in my head since the announcement dropped last week.
Let me take you back to 2016 for a second…
I’m employee #9 at a startup called StockX.
