Source: @benjaminkickz / Instagram
This past Wednesday (February 10) was a particularly painful day for sneakerheads as most of us took home some fat L’s when both the Neutral Air Jordan 1 85’s and Marcus Jordan‘s extra limited Trophy Room Air Jordan 1 a.k.a. The “Freeze Out” released on the same day.
With word that the 85’s were limited to 30,000 pairs and the Trophy Rooms at a mere 12,000, we already knew those L’s were imminent. But heads got really hot when well-connected sneaker resellers began to flaunt their walls of unreleased Trophy Room 1’s after word spread that Marcus Jordan’s Trophy Room establishment backdoored more than a thousand pairs off the rip.
Retailing for $190, the Trophy Room 1’s are already selling for $2,500+ and heads like Benjamin Kickz look like he’s already secured enough pairs to secure the future of himself and his children.
Come on, b!
But BK wasn’t the only head on social media flaunting his Air Jordan 1 haul as others wanted to showoff their plugged in ways because, well, that’s what fools do on social media.
Well ain’t that a mutha.
While most loyal customers tend to get one or two pairs on reserve via “backdoor,” what the hell is up with Trophy Room (and by extension, Nike) basically moving merch by the hundreds to heads who are only going to resell them for more than 10 times it’s original retail price? We’d lowkey understand if this was a general release where 500K to a million pairs would hit the streets, but when it’s only 12,000 pairs for millions of sneakerheads across the world, this isn’t acceptable.
The February 10th release for the “Freeze Out” Trophy Room 1’s was held by an online raffle in which everyone would have to fill out a form and submit it for consideration. The rollout was a disaster as the webpage opened up at 10am with no instructions or methods of entering the raffle. After a few minutes it reloaded with instructions on emailing in your entry only for millions of heads to get an “Inbox Full” message minutes later. Trophy Room then sent out word that they’d do the raffle again a few hours later because of the difficulties the first time around.
Everyone took L’s, b. Everyone.
SNKRS on the other hand sent out exclusive access to the grails at noon to a mere 230 accounts. Unfortunately many of those lucky SNKRS chosen ones complained that as soon as the clock struck 12 the kicks read “Sold Out” instead of giving them the option to purchase.
Highsnobiety reached out to Nike for comment and all we basically got was a “Word? Aight bet.”
“We remain committed to serving our consumers with authentic Jordan products through Nike.com, and our strong distribution network and channels in both online and at brick-and-mortar retail.”
Gee, thanks Nike. SMFH…
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