Months ago | 1st October 2010 16:03
I can remember the very first pair of shoes I sold on Instyleshoes.com more than 10 years ago. It was a pair of European exclusive Air Max 95s that I bought from a friend in the EU. I remember the shoes sold within hours of posting them and I told myself "I need to go to Europe myself to see what they really have." and I'm damn glad that I did. But that is getting ahead of the story because it all really started in '99.
Now this is going to be real difficult for some of you to imagine - but when I started selling shoes back in '99 most eBay (username Keylargo27) auctions didn't have photos - just text descriptions. My background is high-tech and digital cameras (the first one I used was a Sony camera with a 3.5" disk drive....) were pretty simple for me. So I took the time to take the best photos I could of the shoes. This was a pretty good selling point and my auctions would go higher than most other auctions for the same item. But just like now I had tons of issues with deadbeat bidders and really didn't want to deal with them or with an auction format so I changed my eBay user ID to instyeshoes.com (back then you could do the .com) and created the website instyleshoes.com. All of the shoes went there and things became way more fun.
Over the past 10 years I've traveled to 30 countries and have bought 10,000s of shoes. Some of my favorites are as follows:
Buying Pat's Jordan collection. To this day I still have some of those shoes including the Metallic I lows and highs.
Getting a few pairs of Stash Dunks from Paris France.
Flying to Australia just to buy the rest of their Concord XIs that they had in stock. Stayed there for a month traveling around with the Kangaroos....
Finding a Nike clearance store that nobody knew about that actually had cases of Jordan XIs / Jordan Vs and TONS of other stuff.
I remember the first trip to the EU I went into Foot Locker in Amsterdam and just took a photo of their shoe wall and posted it up on Instyleshoes and said "what do you guys want?".
Driving throughout Europe in an Audi A6 TD from the UK to Gibraltar to Rome having an absolute blast.
And probably the biggest things to come out of Instyleshoes.com - the birth of Sole Collector magazine and the forum.
But all good things must come to an end and as of today I have sold Instyleshoes.com's website and eBay ID to Uptempoair.com. My team and I have been dedicated to ISS Forums / Sole Collector magazine 100% and we just lost focus of Instyleshoes.com, so it was time to sell. I've known the owner of UTA for years and actually met him 8 years ago in Ohio. UTA has been around for a long time - and that is saying something in this business environment. The owner of UTA is also named Steve and he has a real positive track record. Let's see what he does with the re-launch of the site... from what I've been told it is going to be something really positive.
For all of those running small websites, you can turn your passion into a career. It will take time and effort - and you'll have to give a lot up to reach your goal - but it will be worth it. I started out with $30,000 back in '99 and have grown that number significantly.
Now this is going to be real difficult for some of you to imagine - but when I started selling shoes back in '99 most eBay (username Keylargo27) auctions didn't have photos - just text descriptions. My background is high-tech and digital cameras (the first one I used was a Sony camera with a 3.5" disk drive....) were pretty simple for me. So I took the time to take the best photos I could of the shoes. This was a pretty good selling point and my auctions would go higher than most other auctions for the same item. But just like now I had tons of issues with deadbeat bidders and really didn't want to deal with them or with an auction format so I changed my eBay user ID to instyeshoes.com (back then you could do the .com) and created the website instyleshoes.com. All of the shoes went there and things became way more fun.
Over the past 10 years I've traveled to 30 countries and have bought 10,000s of shoes. Some of my favorites are as follows:
Buying Pat's Jordan collection. To this day I still have some of those shoes including the Metallic I lows and highs.
Getting a few pairs of Stash Dunks from Paris France.
Flying to Australia just to buy the rest of their Concord XIs that they had in stock. Stayed there for a month traveling around with the Kangaroos....
Finding a Nike clearance store that nobody knew about that actually had cases of Jordan XIs / Jordan Vs and TONS of other stuff.
I remember the first trip to the EU I went into Foot Locker in Amsterdam and just took a photo of their shoe wall and posted it up on Instyleshoes and said "what do you guys want?".
Driving throughout Europe in an Audi A6 TD from the UK to Gibraltar to Rome having an absolute blast.
And probably the biggest things to come out of Instyleshoes.com - the birth of Sole Collector magazine and the forum.
But all good things must come to an end and as of today I have sold Instyleshoes.com's website and eBay ID to Uptempoair.com. My team and I have been dedicated to ISS Forums / Sole Collector magazine 100% and we just lost focus of Instyleshoes.com, so it was time to sell. I've known the owner of UTA for years and actually met him 8 years ago in Ohio. UTA has been around for a long time - and that is saying something in this business environment. The owner of UTA is also named Steve and he has a real positive track record. Let's see what he does with the re-launch of the site... from what I've been told it is going to be something really positive.
For all of those running small websites, you can turn your passion into a career. It will take time and effort - and you'll have to give a lot up to reach your goal - but it will be worth it. I started out with $30,000 back in '99 and have grown that number significantly.
