(Air
Jordan 11 Retro Bred)
Michael Jordan retired nine years ago. His last championship
with the Bulls came in 1998. He is 50 years old and unfortunately, he owns the
Charlotte Bobcats. Yikes.
Yet, no one in sports possesses a more popular brand than
MJ’s Air Jordan Brand.
This Saturday (March 23, 2013) at 8:00 am, thousands upon
thousands of people stood in line at Foot Lockers and Finish Lines around
the country. Another thousand or so crashed those stores’ respective
websites at 8:01 am.
Why you may ask? Well, because at 8 am this Saturday, the
Air Jordan Retro 11s (nicknamed the “Breds) will be restocked across the
country after selling out in a few hours during their initial December 21, 2012
re-release date. Oh, by the way, this same shoe has been re-released (and
subsequently sold out) numerous times over the years since its 1996 release.
Now, the Bred 11s are just a fragment of the Air Jordan
beast. You can replace the Bred 11s with any re-release of an old Air Jordan
and you’ll get the same result. The re-release of the AJ 11 Concord shoes even
saw violence in-line while people waited for shoes that they may not even
receive. Because of this overwhelming popularity, the overall financial numbers
for the brand are absolutely staggering. According to SportsOneSource, “The
Jordan brand has a 10.8 percent share of the overall US shoe market, which
makes it the second biggest brand in the country and more than twice the size
of Adidas’ share” Yeesh.
(Air Jordan Retro 11s
Concord)
Also there is this: from SOS, “Three out of every four pairs
of basketball shoes sold in this country are Jordan, while 86.5 percent of all
basketball shoes sold over $100 are Jordan. At more than $1 billion in sales,
the Jordan brand now makes up roughly 5 percent of Nike’s overall revenues”
This makes the $130 million he grossed in 1984, his initial year with Nike,
look like chump change.
The fact is that even though he’s retired, Michael Jordan
still has a leg up on Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Derrick Rose, Carmelo Anthony,
and Chris Paul. All of those players mentioned have multi-million dollar shoe
deals (LBJ’s Nike deal is valued at $90 million while D-Rose’s Adidas deal is
valued at a staggering $250 million) but their shoes are always outsold by
re-releases of old Air Jordans. Visit Finishline.com right now and you’ll see
plenty of KD Vs (Kevin Durant’s shoes) and LBJ Xs (Lebron James’s newest shoe)
available but you’ll be hard pressed to find a pair of Air Jordan Retros. The
demand is simply staggering with a new re-release outselling LeBron and Kobe’s
shoes by numbers reaching a ratio of 3 to 1. The Jordans retail around $160-185
per pair but can go for 4-5x that amount on the eBay aftermarket (Look it up).
The simple answer is that no player can reach Jordan’s level
for whatever reason. He remains the gold standard of sports endorsement despite
the fact that he has not dunked a basketball since I was in the 4th
grade (Sales have actually doubled for the Air Jordan Brand since his final
retirement in 2003, according to report done by Kevin Spence of the University
of Kentucky). According to Matt Powell of SportsOneSource, “The Jordan brand has established itself as
the premium ‘designer’ brand in athletic footwear. The breadth and reach of
this line will never be duplicated.”
Yet other brands
have tried. In recent months, Reebok has tried to mimic Air Jordan and Nike by
re-releasing vintage shoes. Reebok has released old shoes from Shawn Kemp,
Dominique Wilkins, Allen Iverson, and Tracy McGrady in recent months to pretty
strong sales. However, the thought of ever eclipsing His Airness seems like a
pipe dream.
How does he do? That’s a question that you’ll have to ask Michael
and Phil Knight. I can only treat this as one of those unexplainable phenomenon
that only come around once in a lifetime. While people fight each other for a
re-release of a shoe that came out 15 years ago, MJ is taking a bath in his
estimated $9.53 billion dollars of brand value.
Now excuse me as I try to scrounge up $185 of my rent money
to buy the Breds 11 on Saturday…
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Aaron Colemen is a student at Drexel University and avid supporter of Drexel University athletics.
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