Benjamin Martinez was on the hunt, waking at 5 a.m. on a recent Saturday to get his hands on the new limited-release Air Jordans.
He found them at a Wicker Park shoe boutique–and didn’t think twice about paying $150 for the purple high-top shoes. In a bag beside him sat the white pair he had bought hours earlier.
“I only have about 20 pairs of shoes right now,” the 21-year-old Chicagoan said. “But I’m working on it.”
Martinez is a sneaker head, doting on rare shoes the way some covet baseball cards. Scouting for the latest versions of hot shoes from Nike, Adidas or Converse, sneaker heads help create a buzz in the crowded $20 billion athletic shoe market.
The popularity of sneaker culture spans races and incomes, drawing in a largely male population from across the globe: punk rockers, hip-hoppers and skateboarders alike.
Forget pedestrian footwear concerns such as function; some don’t even wear their shoes. Rather, sneaker heads are driven to find and collect the latest and hippest offerings, said Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst at NPD Group in New York.
Sneaker-head culture, already established on the U.S. coasts and abroad, is growing in Chicago, collectors and store owners say.
Chicagoan Anton Murphy, who said he owns almost 300 pairs of shoes, owns Nike Ueno Air Force Ones, released in Japan for the annual Cherry Blossom Festival. Murphy, 35, reckons he can fetch about $1,500 for them online.
A more universal problem for sneaker heads? Cash flow.
Murphy, who said he has friends all over the world after a decade of collecting, wants to go to Japan to visit a contact.
“I want to go, but the money is an issue,” he said. “Every day I go home and I’m faced with two walls of sneakers, and I think, ‘Would I really miss 25 pairs of the rarest sneakers in this world?’ “
Murphy paused and shuffled some loose change in his pocket. “Probably.”
