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How does a person make up $2,500 in a week? In a cook group, that’s easy. The group creates bots to alert members to restocks. Developers who Maresky employs (he has a paid staff of 40) find backdoor access to hot releases, which allows members a brief but meaningful head start on the sneaker-buying competition. Real-life friends and acquaintances who work at boutiques and brands—known in this world as plugs—will put the group on notice for surprise drops, or even help rig sweepstakes.
Maresky is crafty when it comes to cultivating his sources. Last year, with Papa Johns reeling from horrendous PR gaffes, the pizza joint gave away 10,000 codes for free pizza every day for a month. Maresky managed to score 1,000 gratis pies and, after giving 90% of them to members, used the remaining 100 to send a sneaker store 10 pizzas—“A little bit of everything, he says”—for 10 days in a row. On the tenth day, someone bit. “‘Hey bro,’” they wrote, according to Maresky, “you seem mad cool. What’s your Instagram?” Together, Maresky and the employee rigged the store’s upcoming raffle, won 50 sneakers, and split them. From there, Maresky says this employee connected him with people at other stores so that he and AMNotify now have sources at a wide range of major sneaker retailers. (Maresky declines to name any.)
The group has this sort of access all over the sneaker industry. Maresky claims AMNotify members bought at least 450 of the 500 Post Malone Crocs initially released, and owns 40% of the MCA Virgil Abloh Nikes, which are currently retailing $2,000. One group member tells me they’ve sold $1,489 worth of sneakers this month—and that’s below average. In a good month, this person will sell $2,500 to $3,000 worth of gear for a $1,500 profit. A diligent spreadsheet keeps track of the shoes they’re holding onto—Yeezys, Sacai Nikes, and a pair of original 2017 Off-White x Nike Jordans worth $5,000–and puts the on-ice collection’s value at $13,751.46. Together, Maresky claims that the group buys up 30,000 sneakers a month and has made “collectively over half a million in profit on, like, a given day,” he says, citing figures that come from internal polling.
AMNotify, after having success pooling their knowledge together to win HQ Trivia games, is branching out into other categories: Funko toys, but also art and stocks. (Provided you consider limited Stussy prints art.) Sneakers will remain the bread and butter, though, with Maresky as the group’s leader. He just started college, where he’s majoring in business. It’s honestly hard to imagine what else he needs to learn. “I always say, ‘Another day, another dollar.’”
The Benevolent Sneaker King of Instagram
Jordan Vankeulen’s story starts with the Nike x Off-White Air Jordan 1s, in the “Chicago” colorway. His friend is a great coder, and whips up a program that helps him purchase a pair of the shoes. In a single moment, he makes $2,000 in profit. He is just starting at the University of Oregon, and his life has changed. “It was just like a spark,” Vankeulen says. “Like, ‘Wow, that’s better than clocking into a minimum-wage job.’ The big thing with reselling for me is that I can work one to three, four hours a day, every other day, and I’ll make a lot more money than I would working anywhere else.”
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