What's in a Shoe?
A question running through my mind lately
On my way out the other night, I spritzed myself with a few blasts of “Really Ripped Abs” discount men’s cologne.* While the product hasn’t yet gifted me with Spartacus’s lady attractors, it did get me thinking.
Why is regular cologne so gosh damn expensive?
After all, it’s just a bunch of cinnamon and spice and is incredibly overpriced, right?
Well, after a light reading of a website called Go Business.NL (if we can truly trust the Dutch), brand-name perfumes and colognes can have profit margins of up to 90%!
As in, your $100 fancy skull-shaped bottle of Romeo du Juliet from Marc Jacespeare actually only costs ~$10. That $90 of your hard-earned cash?
Well, just like most luxury goods, it provides you with a few things:
Confidence—Everyone wants to smell like a million bucks (as long as we don’t get trampled)
Social status—Expensive colognes are recognized by people in groups that can afford expensive colognes. It brings prestige and douchery.
It’s just better—You humans inherently value higher-priced goods as being of better quality even if that cologne smells like it went through 1 million bucks’ organic systems.
But what if you could have those same three things, but for something far more reasonable, like $15 or $20 instead?
Well, that exact loophole in the perfume industry is probably why Axe bodyspray is so proliferous these days. It’s also why creating an online business that could mass-produce custom colognes at a cheap price would probably make you a millionaire, but I digress.
Just like Casanova, the free market likes to fill in all the gaps it can.
If given the opportunity, most people would gladly buy that same bottle of Romeo du Juliet for $20 if they knew it fell off the factory truck or was a knock-off that used the exact same recipe. After all, no one will see what cologne you’re wearing, so who cares if it comes in a fancy Shakespearean skull?
But it brings me to another related question.
What’s in a Shoe?
A couple of decades ago, Nike came out with its probably-made-up award-winning line of shoes called Nike Air. Every kid on the block had to have a pair if they wanted to gain Cool Gary’s respect at school.
And everybody needed Cool Gary’s respect back then (just not later in life).
The story was a typical fluffy genius business plan:
The R&D department came up with an ever-so-slightly modified version of the exact same shoe.
The branding department turned it into the next best thing since sliced peanut butter tuna sandwiches
And the marketing department threw hundreds of millions of dollars at celebrity basketball player endorsements instead of, you know, doing actual marketing
Rinse + repeat = success.
But one day, one of these uber-famous basketball players was walking outside of the court when he was accosted by a not-so-friendly mother of several young fans of his.
As the player later recalled, the mother said “You m*@#$**(#$er, you’re charging these babies all this money for the shoes.”
He tried to shoe her away by giving her all the cash in his pocket to go buy a few pairs. Much like me, it was around $2,000. Unlike me, it was in USD, not TWD.
He said, “Ma’am. I don’t make the prices. Here you go.”
According to his story, she smacked the money out of his hand and kept berating him for the extreme prices of simple shoes that kids around the world would love to use but couldn’t afford.
The mother made her mark. The player couldn’t forget what she said and went so far as to cut his ties with Reebok and create a new brand with Payless ShoeSource where his sneakers could be bought for anywhere as low as $15 to $40 instead of the hundreds they usually went for.
That deal with Reebok would’ve been an instant $40 million casharinos.
Several years later, Shaquille O’Neal’s brand of affordable but awesome Dunkman sneakers have reportedly sold more than 400 million pairs of shoes, giving nearly every kid in America a chance to be a bit more like one of their idles.
And who knows, maybe that rejection of overpriced brandism made all the difference in a young future NBA player’s path.
“I don’t give a s*#t how much money I lose making these kids look good and feel good. Even though they’re $20 shoes, you can still feel good about them.”
Kudos to you, Mr. Shaq. Now maybe it’s time for some cologne?
Written by a Really Ripped Flabs white man that can’t jump named J.J. Pryor.
Notes:
It Really is called Really Ripped Abs and I had to buy it because of hilarity.
👇Click the heart thingy? The algorithm loves it. I love it more.👇
Good column. My $69 runners have been just as good as their $189 counterparts. Better , in fact, as the expensive ones gave me plantar fasciitis. Just because it costa more doesn't make it better. Learned that lesson early in life and it serves me well.
BK Knights were all the rage back in my day...very briefly. Hated them. Addidas old skool all the way. Fuck crocs.