How Did President Donald Trump’s $399 Sneaker Con Drop Ac…

It was the first time Sneaker Con needed a Secret Service detail. At the Philadelphia Convention Center last February, former President Donald Trump was the unlikely star of the traveling sneaker show, where attendees buy, sell, and trade rare footwear to fellow collectors.

His presence was marked by a seismic vibe shift: heavy security, guard dogs, competing factions of cheers and jeers, “Sneakerheads Love Trump” signs, and one hysterical woman defending Trump’s character. “He’s a good, honest man,” she insisted, her voice breaking.

“Wow,” sneaker reseller Alex Lotier, who helped bring Trump to Sneaker Con, thought to himself. “This is going really well.”

President Trump was there a day after a New York judge issued a $355 million ruling against him. He was there partly to sell sneakers. Trump’s appearance marked the debut of his official footwear line, headlined by the “Never Surrender High Top,” a gaudy, gold-colored $399 shoe with a silhouette vaguely reminiscent of the Air Jordan 1.

Of course, he was also on the campaign trail. President Trump was there to appeal to potential voters. In front of an excited crowd, he toted the gold shoes and reminded the audience that the most important thing was, “to go out and vote.” He vowed to remember the young people who wear sneakers.

“This is something I’ve been talking about for 12 years, 13 years,” Trump said onstage, “and I think it’s going to be a big success. Your influencers have been very positive, they’ve been real influencers.”

It was a bizarre scene even by the standards of Trump, a man whose political career has rarely abided by the boundaries of normalcy. How did he arrive at Sneaker Con? Who was cluing him into sneaker culture? Who told him that selling $399 shoes was a good idea?

Two of the people who orchestrated Trump’s entree into sneakers were Lotier and Chase Young, the co-founders of Culture Kicks, a sneaker reselling outfit from Philadelphia that built an audience of nearly 2 million followers on TikTok through viral videos of coin flip deals at Sneaker Cons.

They were recruited to consult on the Trump shoes at a Sneaker Con show in Fort Lauderdale in January 2024. There, a man named Bill Zanker introduced himself and said that he had a big-name client who was interested in making his own sneakers. (There’s a TikTok video from that Sneaker Con that shows Zanker hovering in the background watching Young at work.) The client, Zanker said, was bigger even than Sylvester Stallone. Lotier and Young knew not to trust every outlandish pitch they heard, but agreed to meet the man over breakfast the next morning.

At a diner in Fort Lauderdale, Zanker laid out some of the specifics of what he needed.

“We’re looking for an industry expert to be able to help consult him on how he should release the shoe, how you make it so that it’s the most valuable,” Lotier recalls the man telling him.

The client, Zanker said, was his business partner, the former President Donald J. Trump. Lotier was skeptical. Over breakfast, Zanker took a video of Young proposing how Culture Kicks would release the shoes and said he was sending it to President Trump.

“I love him,” the text message response said. “Let’s do it.”

There at Lester’s Diner, Culture Kicks agreed to work as consultants on President Trump’s official sneakers. They planned to bring him to Sneaker Con and sell the first pair of his shoes live at the show, although they weren’t sure until the day of that it would actually pan out.

Lotier and Young stayed in regular contact with Trump’s team, but didn’t communicate with him directly until they met at Sneaker Con in Philadelphia.

Culture Kicks didn’t design the sneaker. Lotier says he and Young consulted on some elements of the shoe’s look, but were more involved in the strategy around its rollout. They offered feedback on how to make the Never Surrender High Tops more enticing for collectors.

“We did tell them to make sure that they make limited ones,” Lotier says, “and we did tell them to only make a thousand so that it wasn’t too many and would actually allow them to sell out, and then kind of built the sales model for them.”

He didn’t decide the $399 price for the shoe—Lotier says Trump’s team came up with that—and doesn’t know how much the sneaker cost to make. (The Trump camp asked if the shoe might sell for over $1,000 on the secondary market, according to Lotier. One man paid $9,000.) Lotier says Trump’s shoes were made in the US, which would up the production costs.

Culture Kicks’ co-founders knew when they signed up for the Trump sneaker project that they were taking a risk by aligning with a politician so divisive. They have seen the blowback from it. But Lotier is proud to have facilitated the release of an instantly iconic sneaker, one that he says is a huge draw as a display piece at Sneaker Con events now. He’s proud to have built his business up from a basement in South Philadelphia to a gig working with the president.

And while he does believe the Sneaker Con moment in a crucial swing state helped Trump’s reelection campaign, he doesn’t see the sneaker component of it as overtly political.

“With somebody as controversial as the former president, we know it’s in our best interest to just partner with a president who’s releasing a sneaker because it’s never happened before and make it all about that and not about anything political,” Lotier says. “So that’s kind of the spin that we put on it.”

Days before Trump took office for his second presidential term on Monday, Complex spoke to Lotier about working with the campaign, whether Trump should be allowed a place in sneaker culture, and what’s coming next from President Donald Trump’s official line of sneakers. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Did you get a sense of why sneakers, how Trump’s campaign arrived at this group as one worth targeting in the first place?
Yeah, I think he was definitely going for the younger demographic and people that are interested in, I would just say the hustler mentality, the entrepreneurial hustler mentality. I keep coming back to that because it’s true, just how he can connect with that sort of population. And obviously Pennsylvania is a huge state, so there’s political implications there, but I think since he saw the success in the sports card world, I think he wanted to really go do a sneaker now because it’s a perfect marriage, the sports card world and the sneaker world. Once it worked there, it’s like, alright, let’s try to do this again, but go bigger and clearly it shows it’s going to go bigger.

Were you worried at all about the transactional nature of this whole thing? I have a hard time imagining that Trump’s foray into sneakers is more than a campaign stop.
Yeah, it was definitely something that we had to consider, if we were going to potentially lose or make our followers feel like we have a strong political stance or something. But I think the way that we framed it was very understandable, and a lot of people in the industry who were able to be part of this whole thing kind of just harped on the fact of being part of a presidential sneaker release—the first ever.

And in our industry, this was a huge milestone, but with that said, we obviously did receive some backlash here and there. People in the comments said, “Yeah, unfollowing.” Now, even when I post on my personal, you get unfollows and people in the comments were definitely giving some hate in the sense of, “We don’t stand with you anymore,” even though it’s clearly a business transaction. So those sort of repercussions, you got to play the opportunity cost, and I think as a team and as a brand, we handled it very well, and it definitely allowed us to grow across the world now and even have other people over the last year seeing the success of what we were able to do with the former president reach out to help consult them, release their own sneaker lines.

Do you think that people in your position should be more protective of sneaker culture as to whether or not certain people are allowed in? Just on this idea of it being transactional, I think a lot of times when we see people enter sneakers, they have more of a justification for it. Do you feel like that justification is needed or do you feel like this just being a big glitzy business deal is enough?
Yeah, that’s a great question. I think if we’re all interested to continue to grow the industry overall, of course there are some people that maybe should not get involved for personal opinionated reasons. But personally, what I believe is that if someone has good intentions and is actually releasing a sneaker or [bringing] new personalities into this industry to help it grow and reach new audiences even more, then they should be welcomed.

Do you think Donald Trump is trying to bring new people into this sneaker world? I feel like this was a moment where he was making a cameo in the sneaker world for his own purposes.
I think that’s a good question definitely to interpret. I think he was putting his own twist on releasing a sneaker as a political figure, and so I think he was trying to release it to new audiences and bring new audiences in: potentially people that follow him and don’t really know about sneakers or don’t know about the ability to resell sneakers and collect them. You see people that do this with their own products, like Jake Paul and Happy Dad and other people that get involved with their own products and kind of blasting them to the world. I think overall President Trump was trying to reach new audiences, but it can definitely be interpreted in different ways.

Do you think gatekeeping is important in sneakers at all? Or should we let everybody in who wants to be in?
I don’t think we should let everybody in who wants to be in. I definitely don’t think that. I think if people, again, I don’t want to keep saying the same thing, but I think if people feel as though they have the right intentions and they want to include our current audience, and there are people within the industry who can get behind it, it’s worth putting together something creative. And I think if that be a political figure, a large artist or rapper—those type of people are definitely more closely correlated. But who made that decision a long time ago to say that we’re going to call rappers and athletes more related to sneakers? Obviously athletes, they’re into sports and sneakers, but it doesn’t mean that people that don’t like politics or don’t like big executive decision-making aren’t able to like sneakers too. So whether it be a big high-level CEO executive that wants to release his own shoe, if he’s able to bring more people into our industry and help lead our industry forward, which then can in turn bring in economic benefits from people that might have liked the Trump sneaker and now want to go buy a new pair of Jordans, I think it’s definitely worth considering.

And in my opinion, it’s not like throw your hands up and don’t let ’em in, because we’re all trying to work together and collaborate together here. And I do think the PR and news of the entire event together allowed a lot more people around the world to understand the moneymaking side of the sneaker industry.

Once the entire world saw that [the sneaker] sold for $9,000 live the day of, and I held it in my hand talking through the mic, and we did a live sale from the event it went for $9,000. And one of your first questions was, what do you think about the $399 or $400 price? I don’t know what that multiple is—20x multiple—but it just shows again to thousands, millions, hundreds of millions, depending on how many people knew about this release, that there’s money to be made in sneakers. Whether that brings in higher budgets for brand money to sponsor sneaker companies, or to even think about young kids who want to go start their own entrepreneurial journey and see that the Trump sneaker sold for 25 times the retail price. I’m sure there was positive ramifications from that news, and I would like to think that there was way more positive ripple effects than negative. That would be my main opinion on the whole thing.

To me, the shoes that I really enjoy, or the shoes that the culture has collectively deemed classic, have something to them that are more than just the secondary market value, like the design or the inspiration behind them. I feel like you’re returning to just the value of this and the moneymaking. I’m not sure what the meaning is to the shoes other than the price.
Yeah. So I guess what you’re asking is, is there a deeper meaning to the sneaker itself outside of the business ramifications?

Yeah, outside of being something you can flip.
Yeah, I mean, I think that passionate Republicans and passionate entrepreneurs or business people definitely like to buy the shoe to have it and kind of keep it as a trophy piece to just have a piece of history. I can tell you today, when we walk around Sneaker Cons, people that have them—even international, we went to Hong Kong—they just have it at their table in a framed box at the top, and it’s very often the number one called-out shoe. If you have a pair of “Red Octobers” there and a pair of Trumps, just telling you how it is, more people are commenting on the Trump sneakers. So it’s just one of those things that I think will live in history for a long time and create discussion and conversation around it, whether that’s a good thing or bad thing.

How much of an impact do you feel like the Trump moment at Sneaker Con made on the campaign?
I think it made a pretty significant impact across the young generation and just showing that he’s able to connect with different audiences that maybe he hadn’t connected with the first time around as much, and really just trying to let people know that he can relate to them. So I think it made a pretty significant impact.

I’m assuming you have a pair of the shoes.
Yep.

Do you wear them?
We do not wear them.

Why not?
Chase is thinking about wearing them to some of our foreign shows. So we did just go to a Hungary show. We’re actually more popular out of the country than even in our own country for Culture Kicks’ demographics, and had a four-hour line in Hungary for a show called Sneakerness.

Basically they wanted us to bring the Trump sneakers and have them at the front of the table so that everybody could see them, touch them, and just hear Chase talk on them. And Chase was actually onstage in front of the entire crowd speaking on the experience and about the sneakers. So I think for Chase, he wants to keep the condition of them the best possible, and that’s kind of the main reason why he doesn’t wear them. But he did wear them onstage when he walked President Trump out, and he was the first person in the world to actually put them on his feet. So there’s a picture of him shaking Trump’s hand that we have on the front page of our media kit. Chase is actually wearing the sneakers in that picture.

Has Trump ever worn the shoe?
That I do not know.

That’s one of the things that again makes it feel like he’s an interloper. I don’t see him interacting with the product, or I don’t see him really endorsing the product. If an athlete like LeBron James wasn’t wearing his signature shoe, we’d all have questions about it.
It’s very true. I think what he really wanted was to see how the audience and how everybody would react to it. And after it was a very positive reaction and reinforcing, I think he was definitely then more receptive to being able to relate to it. But yeah, it really is just kind of like a piece of art and I think a time in history, and the more that we travel, the more it does seem like it’s like a painting. A museum painting type-thing that we bring with us, and people want to engage with it, interact with it.

Have you stayed in contact with the Trump campaign since the launch?
Yeah. The team you’re saying, right? Yeah.

What are those conversations? Are there future sneaker products in the works?
There are.

So you’re telling me Donald Trump has more sneakers coming?
I am telling you that.

Any more information you can share?
I would love to put another call on potentially in a few months, but at this time, we’re just planning something big in the works

I think a lot of people looked at this as something that would just happen as a stunt and not be any sort of sustained project from Donald Trump.
So now that it’s been a success, now that he’s been reelected, now with all of the new audiences that Culture Kicks helped bring into his campaign, we have something in the works that will be much bigger and will allow this to continue and grow. And we’re going to be partnering with them, so we’ll be able to tell you more in the future.

I gotta ask, did you vote for Trump?
That I’m not going to speak on.

Got it. Will you be at the inauguration?
Yes, we will.

I feel like that’s the perfect occasion to bring out the gold shoes and actually put ’em on feet.
Yes, exactly. And maybe ask people their opinion. We always travel with security now, which is good. But again, speaking of it being a museum piece of art, it’s definitely risky, right? Because they’re very, very valuable now. 

We’ve even known people that have gotten offers of $80,000 for a signed pair. So for one of the friends and family, one-out-of-50 signed pairs, there have been offers up to $80,000 across the world, and people that are willing to spend up to six figures.

Do we know why? Who’s making those offers? Who’s willing to spend what you say is $80,000?
International customers at an international show. Somebody was offered $80,000, I believe at Sneaker Con in Hong Kong.

Did they take it?
No.

Wow.
Yeah, talk about diamond hands. It’s like the people that aren’t investing in the stocks, the people that aren’t into real estate, they bought this sneaker, they’ve waited a whole year now since we released it for him to hopefully be reelected and now that he’s going to be reelected, what does the value of this sneaker do over the next four years? And just keeping that piece of art and seeing what happens to their own net worth or the value of that sneaker.

Now, whether they sell it or keep it or whatever, it could be life-changing for some people. And if they’re able to make a $50,000 to a $100,000 sale, I mean, that’s like a down payment on a house from just a sneaker that we consulted over a conversation at a diner in Fort Lauderdale.

Are you still actively working with them as a consultant, or was that just something on that project?
No, we are actively working together to plan bigger things together.

If Biden reaches out, are you doing a Biden sneaker?
I think right now we’re going to stay with the current president because it’s more relevant.