Image via Trophy Room
Limited-edition sneakers, the kind that people line up or crash feeble websites for, present the stores that stock them with an almost impossible set of equations. Brand calculations around supply and demand mean there are always more customers than there are shoes. The cost and effort required to launch hype sneakers fairly—hiring security to tame rowdy crowds, paying extra to bot-proof an online shop—can eclipse what money there is to be made by selling them at their suggested retail price. Remember, these items are limited by nature. They are generally not breadwinners, given the small quantities they come in.
How stores handle these drops, how they approach the equations of a high-profile shoe, either cements or sullies their reputation. At the launch of every coveted pair, they are judged by patrons to have found an equitable system or succumbed to the temptations of bad math. The Trophy Room x Air Jordan 1, a sneaker mired in controversy, conspiracy theory, and allegations of retail grift, is a style that has generated this kind of intense judgment.
The shoe is a collaboration between Jordan Brand and Orlando-based store Trophy Room, which was founded in 2016 by Marcus Jordan, son of the Nike-owned sneaker brand’s namesake. Its design reworks the Chicago Bulls colorway of Michael Jordan’s iconic first signature sneaker with a glittery frozen treatment that represents him being “frozen out” of the 1985 NBA All-Star Game.
The Trophy Room x Air Jordan 1, limited to just 12,000 pairs, has been scandalous from when it first leaked up through its messy release last Wednesday. When people flaunted pairs on social media before they were officially unveiled, Marcus blamed it on thieves somehow snatching them from a Nike distribution center. When still more Jordan 1s flooded the resale market in the weeks before they were officially released, social media blamed it on Marcus and accused him of selling thousands of pairs early and reaping massive profits by essentially reselling his own sneakers.
Multiple sources, some of whom had access to the sneakers themselves, tell Complex that Trophy Room sold a substantial portion of its stock to resellers for well over the $190 retail price ahead of the release date. The details in their accounts differ, but they agree on the big picture. Trophy Room, they say, sold thousands of pairs early for around $1,000 per pair. One source says a small group of longstanding buyers was allowed to get in at $850 per pair, while others were charged closer to $1,200. Another showed Complex tracking info for a shipment coming from Orlando, days later sending a photo showing boxes of the shoes stacked high. Some say there were group buys, where individuals pooled money to acquire pairs in bulk, since the shoes had to be purchased in lots. If such a scheme were indeed executed, Trophy Room essentially cheated the equation, denied the public a fair chance at the collaboration, and likely made millions of additional dollars through this surreptitious selling.
The Trophy Room x Air Jordan 1 has been a controversial sneaker from the start. Image via Nike
That has been the prevailing storyline in the buildup to the Trophy Room x Air Jordan 1, but it doesn’t necessarily preclude other explanations for the abundance of pairs floating around before the release. The explanation from Marcus when the sneakers unexpectedly hit the internet in December was that “sheisty brothers” at the Nike distribution center in Memphis, its largest worldwide, got pairs even before Trophy Room did. The center has for years been a suspected source of sneaker leaks and Nikes that go up for sale on secondary markets well in advance of their authorized release, much less their public unveiling. The first person to post a pair of Trophy Room x Air Jordan 1s with the full packaging was Lawrence Harwell, who goes by @dasouthmemphian_ on Instagram. (His posts include a few canceled Nike sneakers that never saw retail release, but were nonetheless obtained by resellers.) The Memphis-based Harwell uploaded video and multiple photos of the shoes on Dec. 4, prompting a Twitter response from Marcus.
“Funny thing is, we haven’t even paid for the sneakers yet,” he wrote, adding a frowning emoji. “Up until recently, I wasn’t even told they were in America.”
Marcus’ references to the shoes have sought to distinguish those pairs he’s suggested were stolen from Nike in Memphis from those sold through Trophy Room. The main point of differentiation, in his presentation, is a set of blue laces he showed in his own previews that weren’t in any of the leaked images. His narrative is that only the pairs of Trophy Room x Air Jordan 1s that have the blue laces are authentic pairs originating from Trophy Room.
“If it ain’t got a blue lace, they didn’t come from us,” Marcus told Complex in a brief comment for this story.
The early pairs didn’t have blue laces; neither did any of those acquired by resellers before the shoe’s release. The ones sent to athletes and celebrities directly by Jordan Brand, like Jordan-affiliated rapper Bun B, didn’t have blue laces either, though, meaning their presence wasn’t a prerequisite to confirm authenticity. The laces quickly became infamous, themselves a meme and fodder for suspicions about Marcus going to great lengths to conceal the fact that he’d allegedly sold many of the shoes before their release date.
In this theory, the Trophy Room owner scrambled to produce blue laces as a cover-up. That way, commenters on social media speculated, he could claim no involvement in the early pairs he’d sold that didn’t have them. If someone didn’t have the blue laces, they didn’t buy them from Trophy Room, hence they definitely didn’t buy them three weeks early for $1,000 just so they could resell them to someone else down the line. A source with knowledge of Jordan Brand’s release plans tells Complex, though, that Marcus had wanted to use the blue laces from the start, and they were not an elaborate decoy.
Nike.com product images of the laces do not show the blue set. Image via Nike
Few sneakers inspire the level of conjecture and rabid attention the Trophy Room x Air Jordan 1 has, even though so many have a similar story. Almost every sneaker’s official brand rollout is preceded by a leak. Almost every sneaker is available for costly resale prices before its release. If there is a new Off-White x Nike project or a pair of Yeezys releasing on any given weekend, there are stores around the world who have already moved their stock, selling it to resellers for a premium, enjoying higher profits, and avoiding the strain of actually trying to release the sneakers in accordance with brand guidelines. Backdooring—as in, someone is secretly selling pairs out of a store’s backdoor while naive customers on the store floor stand no real chance at them—can help offset a store’s expenses. Setting morals aside, the numbers just make sense.
“Almost every store is forced or obligated, in my opinion, to have to sell pairs at a higher rate earlier than they’re supposed to,” says Jaysse Lopez, who owns a Las Vegas sneaker store called Urban Necessities. “Because that’s just the reality of business.”
He used to get mad at the idea of people backdooring sneakers until he opened his own store and realized what kind of overhead business owners were dealing with. Urban Necessities operates on a consignment model, meaning Lopez doesn’t own the stock, nor does he have an account with any of the major sneaker brands. He doesn’t have access to shoes at wholesale prices that he could resell for secondary-market prices, but doesn’t fault anybody who does. Even if they could damage their relationship with brands like Nike in the process.
“The reward is worth the risk in that scenario,” Lopez says.
He’s not eager to pinpoint where he thinks the early pairs of Trophy Room x Air Jordan 1s came from, but doesn’t necessarily believe that Marcus Jordan is the culprit behind their appearance.
“I think it’s more realistic that it found its way out of a warehouse before it made its way to where it needed to go,” Lopez says.
That people are less attracted to this version of the story owes partly to the fact that it does not involve Michael Jordan’s son. The high drama of a sportswear industry scion possibly plotting to sell off his sneakers like a cartel kingpin, offering connected buyers the best prices and then letting the work get passed through the supply chain and broken up, is more alluring than sneakers disappearing from a truck at a Memphis loading dock. Again, sneakers get backdoored every weekend, but the majority have not captivated imaginations like the Trophy Room x Air Jordan 1.
Another reason why the shoe has been so closely examined as pairs made their way into the wild before they were sanctioned to is that their distribution was so tight. With most sneaker releases, the odds of actually identifying retail corruption is trickier. The Off-White x Air Jordan 4 that released in July 2020, for example, was available at over 70 retailers worldwide. The Trophy Room x Air Jordan 1 was only officially available at Trophy Room and via Nike’s SNKRS app, meaning there are far fewer places the pairs on the resale market could have come from.
Those resale market pairs have populated social media photos for weeks. The depictions of them are rage-inducing flexes wherein a user might pose alongside 100 or more boxes of their Jordan 1s, often captioning his photo with a bromide about his hustle. They’ve also generated doubt that the early Trophy Room x Air Jordan 1s on the market are real at all. This again spoils the more dramatic notion that Marcus sold the shoes, but it’s completely possible that there are already fakes on the market. The same source who provided background on the blue laces says that factories in Asia were working on knockoffs of the Trophy Room x Air Jordan 1 concurrent to production of the real pairs last year. Resale platforms like StockX are already taking steps to try to ensure that no fake pairs are sold through them.
“As an additional precautionary measure, only our most experienced authenticators are responsible for review of this particular sneaker,” a StockX spokesperson said. “Our team closely tracks the most attempted fakes to ensure they know exactly what to look for in a game that is changing daily.”
The resellers who spoke to Complex are adamant that their pairs came originally from Trophy Room selling them early and have no doubt about the legitimacy of their items. Of course, the people who sell shoes way over their original prices stand to benefit from the idea that their product originated from the source. Anyone offering Trophy Room x Air Jordan 1s would be keen to believe theirs were from the store, blue laces or not.
The laces were not the only discrepancy between early pairs and those that were eventually sold when the retail launch arrived at retail last week. There was also confusion over the retail price—most early pairs of the latest Trophy Room x Air Jordan collaboration were labeled at $170 on the box, but the sneakers were officially announced at $190. This caused more disbelief that early pairs were real, but Nike or Jordan adjusting a shoe’s price before its release is not totally uncommon. A source says that Nike had both prices listed for the shoes internally before arriving at $190. This final kink before the launch added to the myth, charging the idea that something—maybe everything—was amiss with the Trophy Room x Air Jordan 1.
Then came the actual release last week, which never really stood much of a chance of quelling the stories that the sneakers had been compromised. Minds were made up at that point, and the common assumption was that barely any pairs would actually be sold because Marcus and Trophy Room had already unloaded a good chunk of them. It was to be, like so many sneaker launches in this era of hype, an exercise in masochism.
The expectation was met in every way. The SNKRS app launch, handled by Nike, was predictably ambiguous. The shoes did not pop up for sale there, but were offered to select customers via the “exclusive access” promotion. Nobody anticipated much success there, anyway—before the drop, social media users circulated information claiming that a relatively tiny amount of the Jordans were made available. A source at Nike confirms with Complex that only a few hundred of the 12,000-pair run of Trophy Room x Air Jordan 1s were available on SNKRS.
Trophy Room had announced an online raffle for its pairs, but the store’s website couldn’t load the raffle form once it went live. After that, the site was updated to call for raffle submissions via email. The email inbox quickly filled up, making entry beyond the window of the first few minutes impossible. Trophy Room posted a notice on social media that it would reopen the raffle a few hours later, but the inbox immediately filled up again.
The raffle did nothing to convince shoppers that the sneakers were being sold in a fair way. The approach can actually help a store obfuscate how much stock it has. In an online raffle, stock numbers usually aren’t loaded anywhere and hence not visible to people who build tools to monitor such numbers on store websites.
“Their raffle thing implied that they were going to send out invoices for all of this stuff,” says an industry source familiar with the release. “That really makes me think they did backdoor a good amount of it. It takes a huge amount of time to do this.”
They explain that, barring the use of a specialized tool automating the process, it would take a week for a store like Trophy Room to actually generate over 10,000 invoices from email submissions. Stores are not always equipped for these types of operations, which makes backdooring a simpler and more profitable solution.
“I think Nike sets up a lot of these guys for failure,” the source says. “It’s an almost impossible task to sell this many high-profile shoes. And a shop that’s new and not used to this stuff is going to fuck up.”
Those shops are pilloried on Sneaker Twitter at every misstep. There’s genuine frustration, but there’s also some glee derived from publicly ridiculing the stores that fail. People trade memes and rush comment sections underneath unrelated announcements to post their complaints. Ironically, the most vocal in this chorus are often bot users and resellers. Though they spend much energy seeking to gain advantages in sneaker releases, they become incredulous online when someone else is perceived to have gained an advantage using means different from their own.
This group turned Marcus into a target over the belief that he resold the Trophy Room x Air Jordan 1s early. He’s kept quiet on the speculation about reselling and promoted the shoes regardless of rumors. He declined to comment on the early pairs for this piece in depth, but did dismiss them as “a lot of people acting funny for clout.”
The pursuit of clout may have been the thing that sent the Trophy Room x Air Jordan 1s out of control. Sources tell Complex that the buyers who had access to the shoes before they released weren’t supposed to post photos showing they had them. They were meant to move them discreetly. Once the posturing began and people did start publicly showing their hoards of Trophy Room x Air Jordan 1s, the stories of their ill-gotten gains began to take shape.
These tales still feel, on some level, too brazen to be true. Would Michael Jordan’s son really put himself in such a position? Did Marcus believe himself invincible because anyone who could hold him accountable at Jordan Brand would ultimately have to answer to his father? Could Trophy Room reasonably have expected to backdoor thousands of pairs of such an exclusive shoe and get away with it? There was money to be made, sure; but a mishandling of the situation could tarnish the store’s reputation permanently.
Talk of backdooring has dogged Trophy Room for years, but never to this extent. In a 2019 episode of Complex’s sneaker talk show Full Size Run, Marcus shut down the allegation that his store was unfairly selling its sneakers.
“No matter how many sneakers we put online,” he said then, “people are gonna say we backdoor.”
Marcus is aware of the stigma around his store. It’s possible that because of it, he felt motivated to entertain the leaks of the Trophy Room x Air Jordan 1s on social media back in December. He’s not responded directly to the many theories about the shoes on social media since, but there were moments in the rollout when it felt like he did. He’s used the tagline “rumor has it,” a reference to the design story about Michael Jordan’s status in the 1985 All-Star Game. The phrase, which is embroidered on the inside of the Jordan 1, works as a double entendre now, given the allegations around its release.
“Rumor has it that this shoe has an interesting story,” Marcus says in a promotional video introducing the sneaker. You almost expect him to appear and wink at the camera.
If he did do it, if what people are saying about the Trophy Room x Air Jordan 1s is true, the question now becomes whether there will be repercussions. The backlash exists online, but it’s difficult to tell if it exists inside Nike and Jordan. Both still do benefit from this kind of fervor. And they’ve made past comments about keeping releases fair, but a suggested retail price is still only suggested. Plus, the product is even more coveted than before—the Trophy Room x Air Jordan 1 is now reselling for around $3,000.
It’s not a sneaker that people inside the industry are very willing to talk about or publicly raise issue over. Almost everyone Complex spoke to for this story asked their names be withheld, as printing them could threaten their access to rare shoes or intel about them. Nobody wants scrutiny from Nike. Reached for comment, Jordan Brand did not speak to the specifics of the Trophy Room x Air Jordan 1 controversy.
“We remain committed to serving our consumers with authentic Jordan products through Nike.com, and our strong distribution network and channels in both online and at brick-and-mortar retail,” a spokesperson said.
An industry insider who’s kept abreast of Jordan Brand matters says that some people who work there have been aware of the backdooring accusations against Trophy Room, but have not spoken out because of the store’s familial ties to the brand. This source says that Jordan employees have their own unique set of calculations to consider.
A complaint about the business of Michael Jordan’s son must be weighed with care, because it could have negative consequences, they say. But if Trophy Room really does backdoor its sneakers and nobody says anything, the game will continue to be rigged.
“Who wants to be the courageous one,” the source wonders, “to take a stand and say this isn’t right?”