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Kanye West and his Yeezy sneakers will go up against Apple and its iPhone on Friday, September 21st, as the two iconic products go head-to-head for the first time.
This battle between the debut of the Yeezy Boost 350 V2 and the first availability of the new iPhone XS Max is going to cause sneakerheads of the world to have to make a very hard decision.
Do they camp out in hopes of scoring the latest release from from Kanye West’s Yeezy line of adidas sneakers in what has been promised to be the biggest sneaker drop yet?
Or do they set up shop at their local Apple store and try to be one of the first to own the largest and most expensive iPhone ever released?
Never before has tech and fashion collided in such a way.
“If you walk down the street next weekend it will be hard to know if the line is for an iPhone or the next sneaker drop,” Adam Bain, former chief operating officer at Twitter and sneaker collector, told the Financial Times. “Part of the allure is that they are hard to find and hard to acquire … It’s the exact same mentality.”
West tweeted back in April, “Yeezy will hit a billion dollars this year. It is the 2nd fastest growing company in history. It is a unicorn on its way to becoming a decacorn.”
https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/989150253185052674
It’s no coincidence that he used the language of Silicon Valley when talking about his brand. And it’s no coincidence that Apple hired someone from Burberry in 2013 to run its retail stores, have created a special Hermès edition Apple watch, or seen people like Virgil Abloh – a Nike collaborator with his brand Off White – attend launch events like the one held this month.
“Apple is not a tech company, it’s a luxury brand,” said Scott Galloway, professor of marketing at the New York University Stern School of Business. “Just as Apple copied Louis Vuitton, you’re going to see Nike and adidas copy Apple.”
As we have seen with both the sneaker market (espcially with Nike) as well as the technology market, by keeping their products limited and/or exclusive, both the demand as well as the prices for these products has never been higher.
How long this can be maintained is up for debate, as Giovanni Compiani, assistant professor at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, points out, “I do not see this as a sustainable strategy in the longer term.”
For now, however, the hype is very real.