Analyzing data of Nike SB’s most iconic pair: the SB Dunk
I’m a huge fan of Nike’s SB Dunk, such an iconic pair among skaters today (like me!). Unfortunately, this particular model of shoes isn’t that simple to get, some models are now getting resold for thousands of dollars. I wanted to get some insights about this success, and, I was able to extract most of the data I needed by tinkering with StockX API, a popular clothes and shoes reselling website.
Let’s get it straight to the point — As of the date of writing, Nike did release 762 SB Dunk, more precisely, 425 low-top models, 72 mid-top models and 273 high-top models.
The year 2020 was a turning point for the SB Dunk, with a total of 43 new models and some of the most hyped releases (collaboration with Travis Scott, Ben & Jerry, Strangelove, etc.). StockX stated in their blog, “2020, The year of the Nike SB Dunk”. Finally, this chart also suggests that Nike did abandon the mid-top model, maybe they tried to revive it between 2018 and 2020?
I really like this chart, we can really see that the release date has an impact in the price. SB Dunk Low released in 2002 has an average reselling price of €5390 today! But this chart does illustrate two other things, perhaps some of you noticed — High-top models are always cheaper compared to Low-top and mid-top models have pretty stable reselling price.
When comparing 20 years of data, using the average is not the best option, instead we can confirm the statement above by comparing the median price. Low > High > Mid.
This chart shows the most expensive releases as of 2022, not too surprising, we can find the “city-pack” dunks (Paris, NYC, London, and Tokyo). The price is mostly explained by the age of these pairs, most of them are early 2000s, but we can see three exceptions, colored in green, the Friends & Family editions. Some collaboration releases gets a very-limited release reserved to a close circle of people such as Parra 2019, Girls Don’t Cry and Diamond Supply dunk.
It’s also quite funny to see the “What the Dunk” SB Dunk, a Dunk made from 31 other dunks, specially made for and featured in the 2nd video part of Nike SB “Nothing but the Truth” in 2007.
Before ending this article, let me introduce you two last charts, not the most readable but still insightful:
These two charts illustrate the price evolution of each of the models released in 2022 between their release date and today. The SB Dunk is quite similar to a speculative market, almost all new release are overestimated and then corrected to a stable price, and, then the price will slightly go up after months or years for some models. In my opinion, this depends on many factors, such as the design, collaboration, references to an artist or cultural thing and more. But this is not an absolute truth either, for example, as of the end of 2022, some models didn’t work that well. For example, the SB Dunk Low x Polaroid, despite being a collaboration pair, the price doesn’t seem to go up, stabilized around €170.
Thank you for reading this article! Let’s play a little game, put in comment your estimation of which pair of 2022 will gain the most in value over the next year. My bet is the SB Dunk Low x Neckface, based on the actual value of the last year Halloween pair, Mummy.
Maybe in a next episode, we’ll try to predict prices using Tensorflow or Facebook Prophet.
Side notes:
- This article has no goal to promote reselling pairs nor botting retailers websites.
- Analysis were made in Python using Streamlit and Matplotlib.
- All prices displayed in this post are in Euro.
