Courtesy of Val Zapata
She gradually built a network of trusted buyers and sellers in the industry. Whenever she met another reseller, she would ask for their Instagram handle.
“Then, I would watch his story and figure out who he was doing business with,” said Zapata. “So I built a little tiny network through all my local resellers, and that grew to me learning about trade shows.”
An early piece of advice she heard from another reseller stuck with her: “Connections over profits. Grow your connections so people will always sell to you.”
You never know who you’ll meet if you put yourself out there on social media and attend events and trade shows. Zapata says the best deals she scored came from a “random” event in Boston in early 2024. It was a relatively mellow scene, except for one seller with a megaphone. “He’s the only person who’s excited, and he’s like, ‘I’ve got shoes for sale. Everything’s got to go.'”
His shoes had price tags, but Zapata decided to try her hand at negotiating.
“I’m like, ‘Listen, I’m just going to shoot you some offers,'” recalled Zapata, who picked up a shoe with a $600 tag on it and offered $150. The seller countered with $160. She took the deal and moved on to a second sneaker, which she negotiated down to $80. “He either had no context, or he just didn’t care. I look at my team and I’m like, ‘Grab everything we could possibly take, put it against the wall, and then we will negotiate,’ because I could see that people were starting to realize what was happening.”
She walked away with about 450 pairs of shoes, she said, “and we nearly quadrupled our money on that deal, which never happens in sneakers.”
It was a once-in-a-blue-moon deal that wouldn’t have been possible if Zapata didn’t know her niche as well as she does.
The market changes constantly. She stays up-to-date on what’s popular by attending events, paying attention to what people are wearing, and observing what her favorite sellers are buying and avoiding.
“We try to find a medium where we find what’s popular right now — for example, Yeezy GAP is popular right now, AntiSocialSocialClub and Supreme will always be popular in the streetwear — and then we try to find more everyday brands that people also love, like your Nikes and Adidas. The things that are always tried and true,” said Zapata, whose company has expanded into streetwear.
For a while, however, she says she stuck to what she knew best, which were retro Jordan sneakers: “We didn’t veer off. I didn’t sell the Nike SB until maybe six months ago because I didn’t understand what a Nike SB really was. So we stayed within our frame of what we knew and what our customer liked.”
Sourcing the product is half the battle. She then has to sell, which she predominantly does through live shows on Whatnot. She’s found that the more she can educate her buyers, the more successful she is.
“Holly might come on and say, ‘I love that pink sneaker,’ and bid. But if I tell Holly, not only is this a really cool pink sneaker, but this is a 2020 collectible from Kobe Bryant, Holly might be willing to pay a little bit more,” explained Zapata, who starts every product at a dollar during a live show. The highest bidder takes it home. “But if I don’t know and don’t share, then they’re just consumers bidding and trying to get a good deal. So I learned very early on that I have to bring knowledge to them.”