People desire the shoes due to the scarcity. Producing more supply would lead to a commodity and less popular shoe/brand over time. No one talks about shaq shoes from Walmart because they are using the model you are suggesting
People desire the Shaqs too - apparently 100M+ have been sold. At 5k to 20k units each time, hyped release Nikes will never ever add up to that type of volume and can never contribute meaningfully to a $200B company's bottom line. They have to be viewed as an advertisement that somehow adds prestige to the shoes they actually make and sell at high volumes. It's probably a much less important advertisement than the big name athletes they sponsor too - I bet they could discontinue the hype releases and not lose much market share.
You have absolutely hit the nail on the head; here.
I think - Ye aside - Yeezy is a great example of how there can be a balance between this like insane run of only 1000 shoes (which only sell for like $250-350 USD retail anyway…so - yeah - where’s the profit again?) - to mass market ‘Wal-Mary’ level availability.
The only people who benefit from limited releases are scalpers. Period. There’s no way the shoe company makes that much profit off a limited release because the limited releases are wildly somehow still usually at ‘regular’ prices.
A solid pair of YEEZY 350’s is not that hard to come by for any even half-committed sneakerhead, I’ve got 3 pairs and my girlfriend has two. We hardly tried. I won the lottery twice myself, and only ever entered 6 times.
It’s really a shame what happened with Ye, because despite all the drama; the Yeezy fashion project was actually an interesting one that had some real potential to find an actual, honest-to-God balance between artificial scarcity and actually selling the goddamn product.
