Jordan 4 Retro Doernbecher
Detroit Venture Partners has found a different kind of tech company to invest in.
The venture capital firm, owned by Dan Gilbert, Josh Linkner and Brian Hermelin, has invested in Campless.com, a website that provides data to those known as sneakerheads, who collect rare, expensive, high-end sneakers, writes Tom Henderson of Crain's Detroit Business.
Some collect for love of sneakers, others for profit.
The amount of the investment was not disclosed, Crain's reports. The company has 10 employees and moved from Philadelphia to One Campus Martius in downtown Detroit, which is owned by Gilbert.
The company website describes itself this way:
We collect data about the resale marketplace, analyze it, and report back to you. Our primary data source is eBay. We analyze over 13 million eBay auctions (and counting) to provide many statistics about sneakers. The Campless Sneaker Price Guide is our foundational work, but there’s a lot more to sneakerhead data than price, including the number of pairs are on the market, is the price increasing or decreasing, etc.
In some cases, we dig deeper and extract insights about the sneakerhead market, such as “ Are Jordan retail prices outpacing inflation? “, “ Which eBay sellers have the best prices? ”, “ Do sneaker prices vary by size? “, and more esoteric questions like “ Are sneakers more like stocks or drugs? “. The Blog link on the top menu bar is a collection of those insights.
Because the more information you have, the better decisions you can make.
Campless, founded in 2012, operates like a Kelly Blue Book for the secondary sneaker market by collecting, analyzing and distributing data about the industry, which the company says is more than $6 billion globally.
The company, which employs 10, has moved from Philadelphia to One Campus Martius in downtown Detroit.
