StockX's January report said the sneaker market was dying. Six sneaker drops in the first 90 days of the year proved otherwise. But a closer look at the numbers shows something more interesting: collectors are showing up, they just are not paying 2020 prices.

January: The Obituary For The Sneaker Market

StockX's 2025 Big Facts report landed in January and the news was dark. Only 47% of new releases cleared retail last year (down from 58% in 2020). This meant that most sneakers were now selling for BELOW their retail price.
Nike's fastest-growing product was a recovery slide in the form of the the ReactX Rejuven8, up 5,811%. ASICS's $110 Gel-1130 was the year's #1 seller.

It clearly wasn't just transactions on StockX, as Nike stock closed Q1 down ~25% YTD, with $300M in restructuring charges and 775 layoffs lined up for April. Social media also was filled with posts about resellers struggling, Jordan 1s being out of style, and.NPR ran "Is 2026 the end of the sneakerhead era?"

Clean obituary. Well reported. Partially wrong.

Of course we can have a debate about the blurring and mixing of whether we're all talking about normal consumers buying sneakers, consumers chasing hype, resellers, or long-term sneaker collectors. I'm not going to debate those differences, but let's take a look at what's transpired in 2026 using actual data.

February: Three Drops Disagreed With The Predictions

February 13–14, Los Angeles. NBA All-Star Weekend turned the supposedly-softening market into a city-wide scrum.

Jordan Brand and Levi's released the Air Jordan 3 SP "All-Star" (LA Exclusive) on Feb 13 with its pebbled leather with blue denim accents and red "City of Angels" chain-stitch embroidery for a healthy $230 retail (along with three other collaboration pairs). The next day, Fragment Design, Union LA, and Jordan Brand dropped a three-way Air Jordan 1 High pack with the Chicago Royal, Sport Royal, and White/Black. Al sold out in minutes. Both are still trading well above retail 60+ days later, per SneakerPing's data:

February 28, everywhere. Jordan Brand released the Air Jordan 5 "Wolf Grey" ($220 retail) — a GR retro of the 2011 grail, 15 years after the original. It was a general release. It should have been quiet and potentially sat on shelves.

It wasn't quiet. Reports came out of Atlanta of shots fired at Stonecrest Mall during the release (a victim was found, expected to survive). Separately, at Quintard Mall in Oxford, Alabama, an argument between two men inside the mall during the same release window escalated into a shooting.

These are ugly incidents, not marketing stories. But as a signal about whether demand for retros has actually softened, the answer was no. A dead retro category does not produce lines and mall chaos.

The numbers matched the scenes outside the malls:

4,854 tracked secondary market sales on a GR retro in nine days. Above retail. Seven weeks after release.

March: Air Max Day Went Off

March 26, Air Max Day. Nike built the program around a storytelling collab most brands wouldn't have attempted with the Ducks of a Feather × Nike Air Max 95 OG Big Bubble, tied to the University of Oregon's NIL program, designed around Pacific Northwest landscape rather than the school's athletic identity, although each pair matches the two floor color palettes Matthew Knight Arena has had in its existence (not a coincidence in my mind). The collection name also references Oregon's 1939 NCAA basketball championship squad the Tall Firs, which my wife's grandfather played on!

Two colorways, GOAT-exclusive: "The Woods" (hairy green suede, moss textures) and "Lumber Yard" (woodgrain embossing, wooden lace tips). Collectors treated it like a grail drop with it selling out and prominent sneaker accounts featuring photos, unboxing videos, and great on feet shots.

A $220 Air Max 95 peaking at $604 on GOAT, and heating up a month later with a +7% weekly trend, is not the behavior of a dead collector category. It's not just not blockbuster crazy prices either.

April: A Tale of a Retro of a True Grail

April 3. The Virgil Abloh Archive × Air Jordan 1 High OG "Alaska" dropped at $230 retail, alongside V.A.A. World's Fair activations in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, London, Paris, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. This was a seven-city posthumous tribute that does not get greenlit for a category in decline.

Then the StockX board lit up.

Per Complex's resale tracker, cumulative volume crossed 5,314 pairs at $626 average within the first 96 hours across StockX alone.

Whatever "the death of hype" means, this is not it.

But look closely at the prices.

Here's where the story gets interesting. Lay the peaks out next to retail:

A posthumous Abloh Jordan 1 was the most emotionally loaded collab drop of the year and peaked at 4.6× retail and has already settled to 2.4×. That's it.

Pull up any hype-era benchmark like the Off-White "Chicago" 1, Travis Scott's AJ1, the Dior Jordan 1, early Yeezys in their prime and they lived at 10×, 15×, even 20× retail for years. The Abloh Archive Alaska, after four days of genuine retail-frenzy demand, is trading at numbers those older collabs cleared on release day.

The AJ5 Wolf Grey drew gunfire at two malls and is trading at 1.3× retail six weeks later.

This is what the headline missed. The drops are still selling out. The crowds are still showing up. The cultural moments are still happening. The premiums though have reset to something much saner than the 2020 prices.

What's Actually Going On

Two things, both true at once:

1. The obituary was wrong. Collecting is not dying. Demand for narrative-heavy, scarcity-driven drops is intact and occasionally explosive. The people reading this newsletter showed up for every drop above, entered raffles, and cherished the pairs they secured at much better prices than 2-6 years ago.

2, The 2020-2024 price band is dead. Flippers banking on automatic 5×–10× multiples are gone because those multiples are gone. The drops that were supposed to be lottery tickets are now just shoes you buy because you want them. The market is doing real price discovery for the first time in half a decade.

That's not a sneaker collector or sneaker market apocalypse. It's a mature collector market — the kind where a Fragment × Union pack sells out in minutes and trades at $368 instead of $3,000, where a posthumous Abloh peaks at $1,070 and settles in the $500s, where a retro AJ5 that drew mall chaos settles above retail but not dramatically above.

Less upside. Also less casino.

What This Means For You and Us as Collectors

If you're collecting to collect, to own the shoes that matter to you, 2026 is one of the best years in a decade. Less bot competition. Drops land with people who actually want them. Retail is more achievable. Resale premiums are moderate and honest.

If you're collecting for a quick flip or even a rapid investment return, the math has changed permanently. The 2020 multiples aren't coming back any time soon and maybe not ever. I have plenty of sneakers in my collection I may have paid more for than they will ever be worth again. However, this only matters if and when I sell them.

The obituary and predictions confused those two audiences. We shouldn't.

Enjoy this time as a collector. It's fun to still have hype and know a sneaker is hard to get, but if you miss it and really want it, it doesn't break the bank to get it in your collection and on your feet. Finally.