If you are reading this, chances are you're interested in protecting your sneakers. Our bias toward the subject is obvious but this Sole Protector Sneaker Protection Guide is truly driven from a desire to provide real solutions and answers to anyone who may be searching. A typical Google search for “sneaker,” “sneaker protection” or “how to… sneaker,” yields mountains of sneaker related information. Unfortunately, the results tend to be downhill from there. Details tend to be thin with age and relevancy also being issues.
Like many industries in the last decade, footwear [sneakers in our case] has enjoyed exponential growth - giving life to companies like Sole Protector. The positive trend also proved fruitful for aftermarket sneaker communities - transforming what was once a “cottage industry” into the fuel that drives super resellers like StockX, Ebay and countless individual entrepreneurs.
Clear benefits aside, there are also negative impacts like rapid price increases, dishonorable re-sellers, malicious automation [bots used to violate cart terms and conditions], counterfeiting on a large scale and public fighting between large enterprises like Nike and StockX over intellectual and other “property rights.” Long gone are the days of straightforward sneaker trading at local sneaker shows. People knew each other back then and no “app” was needed to tell “real” from the “fake.” Your competition was known and you could “hunt” with confidence. Those were indeed the days.
Yes they were good but not all good. Theft was and still is a major risk in the sneaker business. Ask anyone who has been around the business over the last ten years and they can share stories from the UPS dude faking delivery to far more serious armed robbery. Thankfully, being robbed at gun point for a pair of Air Jordans no longer plagues headlines like a time gone by but those occurrences are indeed an unfortunate legacy of the “shoe game.” In the current environment, those days feel like recent history - a little in the past but not so long ago…
Filtering out the good from the bad; useful from the useless, can be challenging for experienced sneaker buyers. However, if you are new to the market or have returned after a long hiatus, today’s sneaker game can be overwhelming. This is where we hope to be useful for anyone who runs into this guide. Our goal is to add anything we have found useful over the years and hope that it helps people acquire and protect their footwear.
We are not experts. Our goal is to be useful and hopefully create something that encourages contribution to a guide that focuses on the best part of any consumer experience - positive buying and ownership experiences. To that end, we are going to avoid assumptions about your experience level and instead let you decide what guidance meets your needs.
There’s a lot to cover with topics ranging from embarrassing SP stories [epic fails], reputable resellers, favorite customizers, bots, sneaker decay, industry sustainability, sneaker manufacturers, sneaker care [various materials], sneaker storage and more! We hope that you find the topics covered useful and if you are interested in a particular topic, please let us know so we can add it to our list.