The Early Days of Blogs in the Sneaker Industry
Gary Warnett, who had his own blog, GWARIZM, passed away last year. He also wrote for sites like Complex, and Crooked Tongues, a forum that went into retail. He wrote for a bunch of brands and was probably the most notable sneaker writer of all time. In the early 2000s, sites like Hype Beast and Highs Nobiliety came up. Sneaker News and Complex really tapped into sneaker media. They started off really bare bones but they’ve become a lot more robust over the years, and now you have a lot of sites getting into sneaker coverage.
Sneaker Education in Media
GQ, the Bleacher Report, and Sports Illustrated are all covering sneakers now. Speaking of Sports Illustrated, they had a revolutionary article published, I believe, in 1990, called “Your Sneakers are Your Life.” It detailed a story in Chicago about a kid getting murdered over a pair of Air Jordans sneakers, and on the cover is a pair of Air Jordan 5s with a bookbag and a gun on them. That moment has always led sneaker journalism, especially from a very mainstream response.
A colleague of mine, Rich, started Kicks in the City, which has been around forever. Rich is a super important dude in the world of sneaker media. He did it all by himself for many years and really killed it. People don’t necessarily give Kicks in the City the credit it deserves, but it was one of the first, if not the first, sneaker blogs. For whatever reason, some other sites did a better job expanding their brand, but Rich was there first.
A little bit after, there was Kicksology. Professor K back in the day. These things all came from the forums. After that, it became commercialized a little bit to where people realized, hey, we can tell these stories and turn it into a business, rather than just a community. Now the game is overrun, and you have a million websites, a million Instagram accounts, a million Twitter accounts that serve this information.
Sneaker Media Evolution for Students in Online Sneaker Education
Back then, it was totally different. You didn’t have as many sources. You didn’t have as many shops taking photos of their sneakers and posting them online. I wasn’t working in sneaker media during that early era, but just looking back on it and seeing the kind of content people were creating, you can tell how different it is. How much they still had to learn. I mean, those things are important, but we’re really on a different level now as far as what we’re thinking about or what we can accomplish or basically how seriously the brands take us.
