Bags / Shoes & Accessories

According to foreign media reports, the sneaker enthusiast community SoleSavy completed a $2 million financing by the end of 2020. Investors include Panache Ventures, Jason Calacanis' LAUNCH, Bedrock Capital and other 12 companies. SoleSavy is a community created for sneaker lovers who want to buy explosive sneakers or related items. The shoes and items traded may be items that retail stores cannot buy or are increasingly difficult to buy.

If you simply equate SoleSavy with Dewu based on the above information, it is actually not possible. In fact, there is a big difference between the two. SoleSavy focuses on the community, and revenue is realized through subscription payments, not transaction rake.

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The two founders of SoleSavy

Dejan Pralica and Justin Dusanj are two co-founders who founded SoleSavy in 2018. The two founders are considered to have relevant experience. Pralica once co-founded Kicks Deals, a sports shoe website that focuses on below-market prices, and Dusanj is the former director of operations of Nike retailer New Age Sports.

In the ups and downs of the sports shoe consumer market, SoleSavy has established a stable interactive community. As a premium-paying community, SoleSavy's purpose is to help enthusiasts who really want to collect sneakers find the shoes they want. These shoes are often preempted by automatic buying robots or resellers when they are on sale.

There are many reasons for the emergence of people who are crazy about a pair of shoes and SoleSavy, a service that helps consumers buy shoes. One of them is the epidemic. During the epidemic, consumer habits that have been cultivated for more than ten years have undergone tremendous changes in just a few months. You can see how difficult it is for people to grab a PS5, Xbox X or GPU during the holiday shopping season, and how many services, Twitter accounts, and monitoring platforms help people snap up during the shopping season.

Someone joked that in the future, robots will rush to buy daily necessities. Although exaggerated, it also shows some facts. In the past year, almost all kinds of products have been in short supply, and limited edition sports shoes are hard to find, and the behavior of grabbing shoes has been going on for many years. Every newly launched shoe has attracted much attention, and the hype in it has made each new product more difficult to grab than the previous one.

Faced with such consumer demand, there are two solutions on the market. One is a standardized trading platform like StockX and GOAT. Although it is a C2C model, the platform plays a very important role. In StockX, buyers make quotations for their favorite shoes, and the platform will match and push suitable sellers according to buyers' needs. The seller does not send the product directly to the buyer, but has to send it to the platform first, and then the product will be sent to the buyer after the platform verifies that it is genuine. In this process, both buyers and sellers are anonymous, and the only things that are public are the price and transaction time. Such a formalized platform that protects user privacy has attracted a certain amount of sneaker collectors, who don't mind paying a 30%-200% premium for new products every time they are launched.

StockX official website interface

Another solution is countless plug-in teams, they help buyers forecast demand and inventory, and then help buyers not miss any new product launch. SoleSavy is such a platform on the surface, helping resident sneaker enthusiasts to develop strategies. However, Pralica pointed out that SoleSavy is more of a sneaker enthusiast community than the purchase itself.

The core of SoleSavy is a Slack-based community in which users share the latest changes in the field of sports shoes and new release information. Pralica stated that the platform slowly builds a community and appropriately admits new members (approximately 400 people per day) in order to ensure a positive atmosphere in the community. In addition, SoleSavy also has an APP to push information and podcasts.

Maintaining a positive community atmosphere is SoleSavy's long-term goal and point of difference, which also enables the platform to ensure that the 4000 members of the United States and Canada maintain daily interaction. Pralica said that he has participated in a lot of sneaker communities, most of which only focus on buying and reselling. This is the situation SoleSavy wants to stay away from. On the contrary, SoleSavy wants to attract people who really want to buy a pair of shoes, or they resell their personal shoes in order to save money to buy another pair of new models.

SoleSavy has been trying various methods to ensure close ties within the community, encouraging online chats, gatherings and even launching community-customized Jordan 1 clothes. These efforts have enabled this company to achieve some compelling performance. Pralica said that the monthly subscription fee of $33 plus additional income guarantees that SoleSavy is already profitable. SoleSavy's ARR is 1.5 million US dollars, and monthly active users account for 90% of the total number of users-these numbers will make any retailer covet.

SoleSavy membership permissions

Although information and plug-in based communities like SoleSavy are the main forms of Slack and Discord communities, other forms of communities are also booming. For example, entrepreneurial communities such as In This Economy and celebrity fan communities are also very popular on Discord. In addition, there is also Zora (a platform for launching and showing people who want to create a fashion brand and making music), which uses token transactions within the platform. This fashion music platform also operates a community, because the community is a sticky user. mixture.

Overseas, in a sense, communities are the future of all businesses. It is foreseeable that in 2021, community-driven consumption will no longer be limited to subcultural groups such as fans, but will become a normal behavior.