![]() ![]() That’s what I can tell that person, but if they’re happy about buying a fake there’s not much we can do to change their mind. “Knocked off” means it would just be from a lower end brand. I personally would prefer if they buy a shoe that has been knocked off instead of completely counterfeited. That person has made up their mind that they’re comfortable with buying a fake. What do you say to someone who justifies buying a fake by saying “it looks the same but it costs a lot less? ![]() Or other times the shoes that are so limited edition that we have never seen or don’t have a shoe to compare it to. Yeah, sometimes we get shoes that are just so old that we don’t have anything to compare it to. Have you ever seen a shoe you couldn’t authenticate? We can take them back to the Adidas factory and say “hey guys can you verify?” Until they say I have a fake and this looks exactly like a fake I’m going to say “we’re right, we have years of experience doing this.” That’s all we can say, if they’ve made up their mind that this is not legit there’s not much we can do. I would then ask them to bring me a fake and show them the differences. So there’s also room for human error, how do you explain that to somebody who says “this doesn’t sound good enough”? So you’re using sight, touch, smell-human senses. If this was a bad shoe and it was mocked as a “B” grade, we would look on the inside where it would say “B” grade. We also look at how well it’s glued together, with some of the fake factories some of the glue might be coming out. So for the most part we know that the shoe is real. Everything is sharp, everything is clean. There’s no misprint, there’s no jagged edges. With some of the fake ones the stitching is a bit crooked. Everything looks pretty legit, it’s even. We also looking the laces, the stitching. If you smell it, and it smells pretty toxic - something’s wrong. We make sure that there’s no toxic glues, a lot of the big companies, especially Nike and Adidas, they don’t use toxic glues anymore. We take a sniff, as long as it hasn’t been worn. Another thing that we do is we take a sniff. First thing we do is look at the construction of the shoe, make sure it feels right. So then what we do is we take the shoe out, put down the box. But again, someone can just switch a shoe in there. So we look at the box first, everything looks legit to me so far. Obviously when someone is paying for this shoe they want to get it authenticated. Yes, this is actually a very pricey shoe, it’s very high value. ![]() The labels are a hard one to say because different countries have different labels, so we don’t generally use it but we do look at the number to make sure it’s the right number. Sometimes these numbers actually do not match up, or things might be misprinted. We look at the labels, make sure all of the numbers and everything else matchup. While this box is a little beat up it is still good in terms of what it should look like. We look at that first and then we look at the rest of the construction of the box. It’s really well printed, everything is printed sharp, everything seems to be where it should be. So one of the first things that we do is actually look at the box. There are guys who see this as an opportunity, you go to anything like this where there are high value goods, someone’s going to try to rip you off.Ĭan you walk me through the process of authenticating a sneaker, what are you looking for? ![]() We ended up refunding him that money, took the shoe and used it as an example of what we need to do at Sneaker Con.Īt Sneaker Con it’s not a big problem. He came up to us crying, that’s when we realized we had a problem. What motivated you to start the sneaker authentication program at Sneaker Con?Ī few years ago, we had a kid who bought a pair of shoes and it turned out they were fake. Especially some of the younger kids coming in, they don’t know whether they’re getting a real shoe or fake shoes so it’s not a huge problem but they still want to have that peace of mind, that “Hey, I did buy a legit shoe.” We just help people making exchanges to know that they are getting a legit shoe. VICE: So you have a Sneaker Con authentication program, tell me, what is sneaker authentication? Yu-Ming Wu: It’s not an official job but we do help some of our attendees figure out whether a shoe is authentic or not. VICE caught up with Yu-Ming Wu at Sneaker Con Toronto to find out more about the show, the authentication program and how to spot the fakes. ![]()
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