The Resale Obituary is Premature
A cooling market isn’t a dying one. It’s a market finally acting like a market.
To celebrate another trip around the sun, well, actually, I’m a Leo, so to celebrate the sun revolving around me for another twelve months, I took a week off from the newsletter. I wish I could say it was to relax, but I’ve been working harder than ever on something I’m incredibly excited about and can’t quite share yet. Monday, though.
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...
