Chris Kirby ’23 has always been into shoes.

The first pair of shoes he truly loved were his Sean Wotherspoon Air Max 97s. He bought them for $550 from the sneaker app GOAT and resold them a year later for $700.

“That was the first purchase where I really saw myself buying shoes to make money,” said Kirby, a risk management insurance major from Havertown, Pennsylvania. 

In October 2019, Chris and his brothers Kevin and Matt, along with one of their hometown friends, started their own sneaker business where they buy and resell shoes. The brothers named the family side hustle KirbyKickz.

Matt Kirby, the oldest brother, who is in the U.S. Army and is currently stationed in Kansas, said starting the business was almost inevitable.

“We always talked about it, especially me and our other buddy. We’re always talking about how to make money and stuff,” Matt Kirby said. “Once I won a few pairs of shoes doing raffles on Instagram, we decided to start KirbyKickz. That is when my younger brothers started to get involved as well.”

Many people buy shoes in hopes of reselling the same sneakers for a profit in the future, said Chris Kirby.

“Obviously we like to try to get the shoes for retail price to sell them for more money later,” said Chris Kirby. “That’s how you make the most money. But if we don’t do that, we just buy them off Instagram or people we know and resell from there.”

Since its start, the business has been profitable. Most months, the Kirbys are able to flip about 40 to 50 pairs of shoes. Last semester, they resold a pair of shoes that netted a profit of over $900, the most they’ve made on a single pair of sneakers since the start of KirbyKickz.

KirbyKickz focuses primarily on the buying and selling of Nike and Air Jordan sneakers, explained the youngest brother, Kevin Kirby, who is a junior at Pennsylvania State University.

“For me personally, I like to do Air Jordans and Nike, like the dunks, Yeezys, all that kind of stuff, just the popular shoes that people like,” Kevin Kirby said. “It just depends on what’s popular at the time, because shoes like New Balance are getting popular again. So I bought and sold a few of them as well.”

Although the Kirbys and their associates are based in the Philadelphia area, their domestic reach is wide because of social media. They have purchased shoes from people all over the U.S., but that comes with its own risks.

“We have lost money to both receiving fake shoes and not receiving money for shoes we resold,” Kevin Kirby said. “That was earlier when we first started, so we no longer will do any business with anyone unless we have referrals or have some way to check their credibility.”

The biggest risk stems from the market. The shoe reselling business is like the stock market, Matt Kirby explained. The brothers never know how much they will be able to sell a particular pair of sneakers for in the future.

“Although we have made good money, we’ve also lost money on shoes,” Matt Kirby said. “ It is hard to tell what kinds of shoes will be profitable. We try to look at industry trends and do our own research to try and limit any loss we could take. So it goes both ways.”

In the end, starting KirbyKickz has given the Kirby brothers the opportunity to combine their passion for shoes with their drive to make money, Matt Kirby said.

“I enjoy buying and selling shoes, collecting shoes and making money along the way,” Matt Kirby said.