There was a time, not too long after StockX was launched, when resellers actually wanted to fight company cofounder Josh Luber.
The frustrations played out in person at a 2018 event in New York City, where local resellers, livid at the rampant price undercutting on the marketplace, confronted Luber while he spoke on stage. The company cofounder held his own, maintaining that StockX wasn’t seeking to take money out of anyone’s pockets, but was hoping to introduce a “free market” best-offer concept to the previously seller-controlled space.
“We let the market decide,” Luber argued, which, to resellers, was a jarring pivot from the pricing they’d been able to establish in the absence of a StockX.
Before the Detroit-based company came along in 2016, sneaker prices were typically determined by consignment stores, like Flight Club and Stadium Goods, and a small number of individual sellers. EBay’s sneaker category hadn’t yet caught up, leaving buyers at the mercy of whatever pricing the resellers settled on. StockX corrected this, allowing prices to settle not only where sellers wanted, but at amounts that buyers were willing to pay.
Today, the platform’s realtime, price guide-like data has managed to win over the same crowd it once incensed. For Michael “Miki” Guerra, founder of Los Angeles resale store Magnolia Park, StockX has become such an invaluable tool for his business that he likens it to “the bible” of pricing.
“It’s just the easiest platform and marketplace to be able to acquire that information,” Guerra told Footwear News. “I think because of that, they’ve become the market standard. The data that’s being presented to the consumer-facing side of things is why I believe people look to it for guidance.”
StockX was founded by Luber, Cleveland Cavaliers owner and Rocket Mortgage cofounder Dan Gilbert, Greg Schwartz and Chris Kaufman. An evolution of Luber’s “sneakerhead data” company Campless, which was simultaneously acquired by Gilbert, the Detroit “stock market of things” served as a middleman which would seek to not only stabilize the marketplace, but ensure buyers were getting what they paid for by authenticating their purchases.
A selection of product waiting to be verified at StockX’s Hong Kong facility.
StockX
Things were slow early on. There were periods when the Detroit company would verify only a few pairs of shoes at a time, and hitting double digits was considered a good day. Then, the company found itself in a perfect storm of luck and good timing.
Just one year after StockX broke ground, high-profile releases such as Virgil Abloh’s Nike “The Ten” collaboration and Kanye West’s newly launched Adidas Yeezy line hit the market. Eager resellers needed a place to peddle their wares, while buyers were hoping to avoid getting burned with counterfeits. StockX presented a solution for both parties.
From there, growth was swift as the platform became a key service for buyers and resellers alike. The COVID-19 pandemic only accelerated this momentum, with more people seeking to establish side hustles and hobbies. By April 2021, just five years after it was founded, StockX was valued at $3.8 billion after raising $255 million in late-stage funding.
Like any growing business that’s grappled with early struggles, layoffs and a global pandemic, it hasn’t always been smooth sailing for StockX.
Most glaringly, you can’t cover the company’s history without mentioning its 2022 legal entanglement with athletic sportswear giant Nike. Rooted in StockX’s Swoosh-branded Vault NFTs, Nike sued the resale platform for trademark infringement and false advertising. After three years in and out of courtrooms, a settlement was reached in August 2025 and the claims were dismissed with prejudice. StockX declined to provide further comment, but said in a statement last year that the specific terms of the resolution will remain confidential.
As the company marks its 10th anniversary this year, FN caught up with the employees responsible for shaping the company and plotting its future trajectory. Find An Oral History of StockX below.
The Team:
Greg Schwartz, chief executive officer, cofounder
Josh Luber, cofounder, former chief executive officer
Sadelle Moore, brand experience manager, first authenticator
Steve Winn, chief product officer, employee number six
Tabitha Davenport, head of supply chain and operations
Brendan Dunne, senior director of customer community and engagement
The Early Days
Luber: I collected sneakers forever and I shut down my last start-up in the crash of 2008. I went to work for IBM in 2010. And for two years, I was like messing around with side projects that weren’t anything to do with sneakers. And then Galaxy Foamposites happened. I was literally standing in line, almost like something out of a movie, and I was like, there’s a business here. And that sort of set on the path to what eventually became Campless.
Schwartz: I had gotten to know Dan [Gilbert] because he was an investor in a different start-up, that had nothing to do with StockX, that I had started when I moved back to Detroit from New York. So Dan and I are both from Detroit. He was this investor on our board and got to know him well. We were about to sell the prior business, and Dan and I started talking about what I was gonna do next. Dan had this thought that the way stock markets have operated for hundreds of years are incredibly efficient. I said, “Man, this is really interesting, and this could apply to a lot of different categories.” Then his kids were actually buying and selling sneakers on eBay, and so he was like, “Yeah, what do you think of sneakers as a first category?”
StockX chief executive officer and cofounder Greg Schwartz.
StockX
Luber: Campless was a side project. It was all volunteer people [doing it] for fun. Originally it was just me, my brother and one of my previous start-up partners, who was a technology guy. He figured out how to collect eBay data for us, and my brother and I were just doing Excel work and creating posts and creating this. What happened was, for that really small Venn diagram overlap of people who like sneakers and people who like data, we were just the only one doing that. There were 17 people working on Campless when I sold it to Dan. There were no contracts. There was no equity. There was no money. We didn’t have a business. We had no way to make revenue.
Schwartz: A lot of the research we were doing just online was either linking back to a Campless blog post, or maybe it was some other article that was referencing Campless data. We felt like Campless kept popping up, and what we liked is, while there are a lot of people talking about what celebrities were wearing or different aspects of sneakers, Campless was the only one taking this data-driven approach to sneakers. The platform we were building was really a stock market, which is a very data-driven approach to sneakers. So we’re like, man, we gotta talk to this guy.
Luber: It led to a lot of conversations with everybody in the sneaker industry. Everybody reached out at some point, but there was never really a good fit. Nike and eBay were like, oh, maybe we could use the data somewhere. No one even offered me a job. Complex at one point made an offer to buy the company. It had two less zeros than I thought it was going to have, so I didn’t think there was really much to it.
The Wednesday before Easter of 2015, I get a random email. They said, “Hey, we work with Dan [Gilbert]. We’re really interested in what you’re doing. Can we talk?” I get on the call with these guys, and it’s like word for word the exact same conversation I’ve had a thousand times. I didn’t think anything of it. Then two days later, they call me back, and they say, “Listen, we definitely want to do this business. We definitely want to work with you. We’d like to fly you to Cleveland to go to a game and meet Dan.”
Schwartz: I felt like [Luber] was a complement to the things that he talked about and that he likes to spend his time doing happen to be the things that I don’t love doing. I don’t love being on stage and out there. At least at that time, it just wasn’t where I wanted to be spending my time and energy. He was writing these very lengthy blog posts, and I’m like, I just want to build a great product. The fact that he loved storytelling and being this evangelist. Then he serendipitously had a different kind of view that intersected well for what Campless could be, that intersected well with what we wanted to do, and we’re like, let’s just do this together.
Dunne: I remember Campless so well because, at the time, it provided something that was missing, which was this data angle. And I remember being really impressed by these blog posts about the sneaker market and these tools that Josh had developed to collate data and to really look at it in this analytical way that was missing then.
Winn: My favorite thing was that everybody on the team was just absolutely relentless. StockX, in the early days, was a bunch of exhausted people who were pushing themselves to like their absolute mental, physical and emotional limits working on this idea.
Luber: So the game was on Easter Sunday 2015, 3:30 p.m. game, and the plan was to fly in the morning, go to the game, and fly right back home.
My wife was 39 weeks pregnant with our second kid, so it was like, let’s make this thing happen real quick. [After the game] we fly from Cleveland to Detroit, spend all day in Detroit. Monday touring the city, meeting everybody, everything else. Monday afternoon, back in Dan’s office.
Dan says, “Listen, we think this is going great. We’d really love you to stay another day to keep talking.”
I text IBM, I’m not showing up for work. I text my wife, please don’t kill me.
So at end of the day Tuesday, back in Dan’s office, he says, “We all agree this is the right fit. We want to buy Campless. We want you to come here and run the company.”
And they finally let me go home. I get home Tuesday, 1 a.m, my wife’s waiting up for me. I walked in the door, and I was like, “I think we’re moving to Detroit.” And she’s like, “What the hell? I thought you went to Cleveland.”
The Moment They Knew
Moore: At that time, I was reselling. I was already in the sneaker industry. A mutual friend of mine and Greg introduced us, and Greg sent the email out to me with Dan on it and requested a meeting. Then later in that meeting, they’re like, hey, can you come in next week and meet a guy named Josh Luber? And during that time, they wasn’t very transparent on what they were trying to build. then by the fourth, fifth meeting, I remember texting Greg kind of frustrated, like, what are we doing? He was like, “Hey, man, we’re trying to build a company and we want you a part of it. Just be a little patient.”
Early on, [authenticating shoes] in this small closet, my thing was I had so much faith in Dan, Josh and Greg. It has to work. I didn’t want to go back to selling shoes out of the trunk. We will make this work somehow, some way. It was never discouraging, but it’s just a matter of time when that major release hits and we get that recognition in the sneaker market where, you know, that StockX is here. I knew it was going to take some time and wasn’t going to be an overnight thing.
Luber: When we started, we’re just slowly grinding a couple shoes more every day as more and more people knew about us. September of ’16 is the first really big OG Jordan release that happens after we’ve launched, the “Bred” Jordan 1. What you had was just a flood of supply all coming into the market at the same time. At the time, we were at like 60 or 70 pairs per day, so to do 301 sales that day was wild, right? It was five times more than we’ve ever done. We’d never broken 100 pairs in a day.
It was the first proof point of the model. When there’s a lot of liquidity in the market at the same time, a lot of people are looking to buy and sell at the same time, which is what happens on a release. Everyone is trying to flip it quickly. The model works well and we could see it.
Schwartz: The Bred Jordan 1 was the first drop where we must have created enough awareness of the platform that when people were looking to buy and sell, the flywheel just really started to kick in with that release in a bigger way than it had before. That was a big moment. I think for several months before that, there was a question like, could this ever be more than 10, 20, 30 orders a day? All of a sudden we realized that 300 buyers and sellers just transacted on this platform and that was absolutely an eye-opening and defining point in that early journey.
Moore: When the Bred 1 released, we were not ready for that. We were working seven days a week, maybe 14, 16 hours a day. We didn’t know because back then we didn’t have a forecast team, no supply chain or any idea of what was going to come. So when that release happened, and later, when all the Yeezy 350s happened, that’s when I knew we were onto something.
Dunne: That was such a fun time because Nike felt a little sluggish before [Abloh’s] “The 10” released. It felt like a lull. Adidas had NMDs, Yeezy Boost, all that stuff. The Ultra Boost, a shoe that most people deem the best sneaker of 2016. I just think that was so exciting because Adidas was so powerful in that era and it really put Nike on notice. Then Nike came back with “The 10” Off-White collaboration. It was just thrilling because you had those two juggernauts really going at it and I think that played out in the resale market as well.
Davenport: I feel like the vision has always been strong. Where we want to go has been strong, what we stand for and what we want to do. It just became how do we grow at a scale that we can be successful and not grow too fast, but grow fast enough that we can service a global market at the quality and the expectations of our customers.
Winn: I think what happened was over, the next six, eight, 12 months, seeing every single time there was a major release, seeing the business hit a new high over and over again. I just remember in 2016, going into holiday season and coming out on the other side of it in January thinking, surely this will slow down. And then it just didn’t slow down.
Growth and Expansion
Luber: Very quickly we realized that we weren’t set up from a facility standpoint to be able to handle it. We were still doing all authentication at the office in Detroit. We were in the basement in this very sort of makeshift supply room.
Davenport: During the COVID time period, we were able to go from three to four verification sites to six to seven, and then eventually into double digits in terms of how many warehouses we had around the globe. That all was something that just happened over time, but really in that 2020 to 2023 period, we saw significant global expansion. Now in terms of warehouses, we have nine warehouses and two retail stores.
Winn: We added apparel and that helps accelerate more growth. We expanded internationally and that ignited more growth in the business. Plus just growing the platform as a business, we just gained brand awareness, customer base, et cetera, was how we held on while the business grew and tried to make the system support it.
Davenport: We’ve seen ebbs and flows and depending on what’s happening in the micro and macro economy, but each one of those to me are a challenge that we get to approach and figure out how to solve that problem.
A look inside StockX’s New Jersey verification facility, which is currently the company’s largest warehouse.
Schwartz: StockX grew because of the team. It’s not because of any one leader or cofounders, it’s because we’ve had a great team that have come in and helped us figure out how to evolve the product and how to market the product better. I’m just very fortunate and grateful, something I’m proud of is the team that we have.
Now sellers approach us and say, “Hey, I’m able to pay my way through college because of StockX” or “I’m running my dream business as an entrepreneur built on StockX.” So the more than one-thousand people that have million-dollar businesses built on StockX has been incredibly rewarding.
What’s Next?
Dunne: I see StockX continuing to invest in sneaker culture and continuing to show people that we really care. I think it just has to do with figuring out how to best serve our consumers and how they want to shop in addition to how they’ve been shopping on StockX.
Davenport: The first 10 years definitely laid the foundation and the framework for what StockX is. The next 10 years is where we get to really build off of that and be able to introduce new lines of business, be able to introduce new ways of connecting with our buyers and sellers, and being able to bring them what they want and meet them in the ways that they want to shop, the way they want to connect within the community and the way that they want to do business.
Winn: I see different headlines out there, talk tracks that exist sometimes where it’ll be like, sneaker reselling is dead. I’ve heard different phrases like hype economy or different things over time, but really culture ebbs and flows. Even just in the last few years, we’ve seen sneakers have moments. We’ve seen trading cards have moments. We’ve seen vintage have moments. So for the next 10 years of StockX, how do we continue to think about the communities, the categories, the things that our buyers and sellers are passionate about.
A variety of products currently offered in StockX including sneakers, collectibles and luxury goods.
StockX
Moore: For the next 10 years, I’m hoping we do more collaborations with creators and more exclusive drops. Let’s say, for instance, I’m just speaking hypothetically, we do a drop with Bape or do a drop with Supreme or Kith. Exclusive drops, exclusively sold on StockX, and creating with the Sean Wotherspoons of the world or the Joe Freshgoods or the Jae Tips of the world.
Schwartz: I’ve been telling our team if you look at Netflix, they were mail-order DVDs 10 years in. So the next 10 years, and frankly, the next decades in general, when you look back 100 years from now, it’s not what we’ve done, it’s what we’re about to do that will define StockX. All built on the foundation that we built in this first chapter. I think there’s a lot of growth ahead for us. I think we are really in our early innings.
