The Yeezy World-Domination Plan Is Working

Over the summer, a Forbes story about the budding Yeezy empire included a picture of Kanye West surrounded by all his footwear creations, made in collaboration with Adidas. The shoes seem to spiral exponentially to infinity. When asked to guess how many there might be, Kanye balked. “You can’t calculate love,” he told Forbes. “If you get a surprise cake from your grandmother, and you didn’t know she was in town, do you start asking her about the batter and specifically the frosting? These things are made to bring incalculable joy. So to ask me to somehow translate this to numbers is to ask your grandmother exactly what the recipe of the cake was.”

But even if Kanye wants to keep his frosting recipe in a vault, certain numbers are spilling into the public. On Wednesday, NPD’s sneaker analyst Matt Powell tweeted his quarterly ranking of the best-selling shoes, as ranked by amount made rather than pure quantity. And among the mall-walker favorites like the Nike Tanjun and all-time staples like the Nike Air Force 1 is (again) Yeezy’s low-top model, the 350.

When the Yeezy 350 first released, in the summer of 2015, spotting one on the street was a little bit like seeing a celebrity. They were released in such limited quantities they seemed to exist more on Instagram than in real life, and it was hard to believe the people lucky enough to buy a pair would so blithely bring them out in public. Now, I see Yeezys everywhere: on New York City tourists, on kids playing hoops at neighborhood basketball courts, and on StockX for below-retail prices. They haven’t taken on Tanjun-like ubiquity quite yet, but the shoe is moving well past its young, edgy phase into a sort of laid-back middle age.

Forbes also reported in its story that Yeezy expects to do $1.5 billion in sales, a figure that is slowly creeping up on Jordan’s $3 billion in sales. The latter has been the template for the former all along. Kanye proclaimed in 2012 and then again in 2015 that the Yeezys “jumped over the Jumpman.” That was and still is a little premature, but perhaps we should consider that Kanye making his target clear.

Because Yeezy is successfully replicating the strategy that’s made Jordan such a powerhouse over the years. Some releases are mass enough to make the Yeezy a top-selling shoe, while others are kept limited enough to make sure the shoe doesn’t lose the cool that makes it desirable in the first place. Yeezy understands that it can’t have one without the other. So while the 350 makes good on Kanye’s Yeezys-for-All promise, the 380s, 500s, and 700s hold up the mantle of scarcity and hype.

Powell also makes sure to point out that Yeezy is still playing with the levers here. “Adidas says Yeezy won't grow this year,” he says. “Tough to democratize without growing.” Yeezy made the list of best-selling shoes for all of 2018 because it released its largest batch of 350s ever. Not seeing the shoe again until this quarter signals that Adidas likely pulled back to avoid oversaturating the market. That said, it’s already been reported that another nine Yeezys will arrive over the course of 2020.

The Yeezy business model requires a tightrope walker’s balance. What nearly all the shoes on this list have in common is that they are not footwear anyone would describe as cool. Practical and comfortable? Absolutely. But never cool. The Yeezy needs to somehow be both: something that can bring incalculable joy even when you know exactly how grandma made it.

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