Nike VP steps down after controversy surrounding her son's sneaker resale side business

[Revolver Ocelot]

She's the gm/vp of nike. She's not checking credit card bills. She dgaf about that lil shit.

Bruh, you see them pics.

He wasn't buying an extra 2 or 3 pair.

He was putting in orders like he was a Foot Locker..lol

 

[LurkerSix]

Yeah he was bugging lol ?

Notice how he lies and claims he did it on his own. This the shit I be talking about with white people that helped fuck up the black community. Too many folks stressing their kids out with toxic ambition, because they keep comparing them to kids whos parents basically gave them everything they have, but to the public they're preaching that "I worked hard by my self" nonsense. I'm positive when people asked his mom about him she was on some, "Yea he built his business on his own and is doing good" and i'm sure she was real smug about it too.

If yall sneaker heads dont get online and make a bunch of noise to get more mayo devils fired over this, yall pussy

 

[King Freeman]

I think someone under her knew what was happening and probably tried to leverage something from her at some point before blowing up her spot.

 

[LurkerSix]

I had to circle back, cuz i keep finding out more about this.

So this is from the complex story.

Nike VP Resigns After Family Tie to Sneaker Reseller Uncovered

Ann Hebert, who worked at Nike for 25 years, left her job on Monday after a report surfaced last week describing her son's sneaker resale business.

www.complex.com

Hebert’s leaving Nike comes days after the publication of a Bloomberg piece focused on her son, a 19-year-old sneaker reseller named Joe. The piece mentions a credit card Joe used for his reselling business, West Coast Streetwear, that was registered in Ann’s name. The reseller insisted to the story’s author that his personal connection to a Nike exec not be written about in the piece and cut off communication after it was brought up.

The Bloomberg story sparked outrage online, where commenters questioned whether the younger Hebert was gaining unfair access to limited-edition sneakers with the help of his mother. Some brought up the six pairs of rare Nike Mags, which sell for over $12,000 each, that he said he’d randomly discovered in a storage unit in January 2020, speculating they were obtained through more nefarious means. One source claims that Joe would buy pairs in large quantities from Nike outlets using his mother’s discount and resell them later.

Ann Hebert’s purview at Nike included its SNKRS app, a destination for coveted product where shoes regularly sell out immediately, only to be resold on secondary markets. The brand spends a good amount of energy and money trying to protect the platform from bots that can help resellers buy out stock faster than any human. Bloomberg’s piece on Joe Hebert’s business describes him using bots to compromise online launches, mentioning that he rang up $132,000 in one morning for a launch of Kanye West sneakers on the artist’s Yeezy Supply website.

That same card, a corporate American Express, was registered in his mother’s name.

IDK whats funnier, her son claiming he randomly found 6 Nike Mags in a storage locker or that his mom was in charge of their app they used to try and stop resellers from using bots to buy everything, whilst her son was using bots to buy out everything and charge 130k worth of yeezys on his corporate card, thats in her name lol.

So that lead me go read the original article. I'mma just post cliffs cuz i know yall hate reading.

Sneakerheads Have Turned Jordans and Yeezys Into a Bona Fide Asset Class

When the pandemic presented a buy-low opportunity, one college dropout hit the road and filled his truck with $200,000 worth of kicks.

www.bloomberg.com

Last July 30, Joe Hebert woke up early and drove to a small warehouse he’d leased in Eugene, Ore., the track-obsessed college town where Nike Inc. was born. He was expecting an important delivery: 600 pairs of Yeezy Boost 350 Zyon sneakers. Released by Adidas 12 days earlier, they’d sold out within hours

It likely got a bump, too, he notes, from ESPN and Netflix’s airing, starting in mid-April, of The Last Dance, a 10-part chronicle of Michael Jordan’s final season with the Chicago Bulls, which drew many older buyers into the market for the first time.
That was also a breakout time for West Coast Streetwear. “I remember the night the stimulus checks hit. My sales tripled,” Hebert said. “In May we did $600,000.”

Before the pandemic-era sneaker surge, Hebert was selling enough bricks to clear $200,000 in revenue most months.

Eventually, Hebert realized that his growing Instagram following included hundreds of entrepreneurial teens hoping to emulate his success, which led him to a new revenue stream. For $250 per month, they could subscribe to a Discord group, West Bricks, where he shared information on upcoming online releases, such as what sneakers would be discounted, when and where the sale would begin, and how many the retailer would have. As of late 2020, Hebert counted about 450 subscribers. One of the first to sign up was a 17-year-old Californian, who told me West Bricks had made him more than six figures.

Hebert’s competitors have access to the same bot software and StockX-borne real-time market research as he does. What they don’t have, according to some of his subscribers, is consistent, sound analysis of what shoes to buy, how to get them, and, crucially, how long resellers might expect demand to persist. Hebert declined to talk about his sources of information,

When the Covid boom got under way last year, Hebert found himself confronting the unexpected problem of having more customers than ever but no way of getting his hands on more kicks. The stock he needed was out there, he knew, languishing in backrooms at the retail outlets fearful American shoppers were avoiding. So he grabbed a pal, bought a 17-foot Ford E-350 box truck at auction, and embarked on a 25-day, 10,000-mile brick hunt. By the time they escaped the U.S. humidity belt, they barely had enough room in the truck for shoes, let alone sleeping pads. Back home in Portland, they lifted the steel door and a wall of orange Nike boxes spilled onto the pavement. Hebert had spent more than $200,000 on about 2,000 pairs of shoes, which he hoped would return a profit of around $50,000.

He was also taking steps to go beyond selling shoes—which I’d learned, quite by accident, ran in his blood. At one point in late June, after his trip, he’d phoned me, and the number was identified as belonging to Ann Hebert. I looked the name up and discovered there was an Ann Hebert who’d worked at Nike for 25 years and had recently been made its vice president and general manager for North America.

When I asked Hebert about the connection later that year, he acknowledged that Ann was his mother and said that, while she’d inspired him as a businessperson, she was so high up at Nike as to be removed from what he does, and that he’d never received inside information such as discount codes from her. He insisted, though, that she not be mentioned in the article and cut off contact not long after our conversation.

In the fall, he’d struck out for even less familiar terrain. When Sony launched its PlayStation 5 console in November, Hebert sensed a looming shortage of stock. “We botted Walmart and Target pretty hard,” he told me. “I ended up with 24 of them and made between $300 and $500 on each one.”
There’d been growing pains outside the family business, though. His bots had initially gobbled up hundreds of PS5 systems, but because he was working in unfamiliar territory he’d made mistakes that resulted in most of his orders getting canceled, leaving him with just the two dozen consoles. “Wish I had prepared more,” he said.

Theres so much to unpack from this story, but one thing for sure is, it sounds about white. The kid is only 19 and dropped out of college after his freshman year, and in turn, his parents financed him a few hundred thousand and his mom risked her executive position in her high paying corporate job, just so he could resell shoes at a better advantage. Funny af.

His discord with insider info, made him over 100k a month. Yet somehow that wasnt enough for him. Sheesh