“You can move that, if you need more room,” says Andy Drasiewski, a 1986 School of Business graduate pointing to a pile of flattened boxes, mailing labels, bubble wrap and packing tape cluttering one corner of a netless ping-pong table. “That’s just my shipping department.”
Lining the basement walls of Drasiewski’s home outside of Rockford are steel shelving units holding scores of boxes bearing the names of name-brand athletic shoes. Nestled on top of a stack of boxes emblazoned with Nike’s trademark “swoosh” is a digital camera he uses to post photos of shoes on the Web for auction. It doesn’t immediately look like the kind of operation that could push $2 million worth of used (no, vintage) shoes out the door in its first three years of business.
But Drasiewski is just as much an international businessman as anyone on Wall Street; during the past five years the majority of his sales have been to fashion-conscious Japan. Softness in Asian economies has caused his company Small Earth to look to new markets: France, Germany, Brazil, Australia. He also increased sales in the United States. Still, demand has driven down prices almost 50 percent from their high.
So if you’re a bargain hunter, consider pair of vintage high-top metallic-gold lizard-pattern Nikes. A steal at $800. He also has them in silver.
Or maybe you’d like some ostrich-print adidas basketball shoes, black mid-’80s Puma Beasts trimmed with short-nap orange leopard-print fur, or red plaid canvas Converse low-tops with a Christmas jingle bell attached to the back. There’s something for almost any taste among the 5,000-odd pairs of shoes he has stored in the basement and garage. “I used to have two-and-a-half stalls, but now I’m down to about three quarters of a stall,” Andy laments. “Sometimes I can get my Jeep in.”

Unique Career Path
In 1994 Drasiewski was in a vintage clothing store in Grand Rapids where he
re-sold clothes on consignment while also pursuing a career in computers. Many of the outfits he started with were his own. “I wore all sorts of crazy things at Ferris. When I worked at the library I was required to wear a tie so I’d wear the widest, loudest one I could find.” Drasiewski explains, “I had closets full of stuff.” A Japanese businessman came in the store looking for old Nikes. After finding out how much the man would pay for them, Drasiewski said he’d find some.
He’s been finding them ever since. The loss to computer systems technology has been a gain for the world vintage shoe market. It’s a market driven by the whims of fashion, fad, popular culture and that always-intangible element of “cool.”

Cornering the Market
Drasiewski first began building his inventory through “shoe buys.” He and his partner would rent hotel rooms and conference space, take out an ad in the local paper, send press kits (complete with battered shoe) to the media, and wait for people to bring in shoes salvaged from the dark recesses of closets. The prices Drasiewski paid kept people coming in.
“Once in Florida a guy came in with three styles I was looking for; I paid him $780. I started with the next customer and the guy’s still standing there,” Drasiewski remembers. “I asked him if I could help him. He said, ‘Aren’t you going to try to sell me a time-share or something?’ I told him no. ‘You mean I get to keep this money?’ He was dumbfounded.”
Not just any old tennis shoe commands that kind of cash. In that first shoe buy ad Drasiewski listed eight specific shoe models, including Air Jordans from the 1980s and adidas basketball shoes made in France.
He doesn’t do many hotel shoe buys any more. One Friday afternoon he got an e-mail from a non-profit organization in Portland, Ore. They’d seen his Web site (smallearth.com) and wanted to know if he was interested in buying a few thousand pair of shoes Nike had donated to them in the mid-’80s. Drasiewski was there on Monday morning when they opened and bought two thousand pairs of shoes on the spot and a couple thousand more a few weeks later.

If the Shoe Fits
Buying and selling vintage athletic shoes isn’t a career for which there’s a set course of study, and yet the classes at Ferris State University that trained Drasiewski to design computer systems also prepared him to appraise and re-sell metallic-snakeskin adidas high-tops. “I was selling on the Web long before e-Bay was around,” Drasiewski notes. Small Earth continues to do most of its selling on the Internet.
From designing a business plan to talking to the media, the seemingly simple process of re-selling old shoes actually requires a formidable skill-set: marketing, public speaking, accounting, economics. “The economics program at Ferris was great. I especially got into studying theories of supply and demand,” Drasiewski remembers.
So what kind of shoes does a guy who deals in vintage footwear favor himself? “I like first edition Air Jordans, especially in unusual colors like white and metallic green. You look at those and wonder why anyone would wear them. I love that.”
It’s that love of the unique and authentic that keeps the vintage shoe market afloat. It’s also what propelled a student who wore skirts and combat boots to marketing class to take the entrepreneurial dream where no sneaker has gone before.

C&G