How Goat sneaker marketplace founders went from roommates to global footwear industry disrupters
- Footlocker just invested US$100m into the online company founded by serial entrepreneurs Eddy Lu and Daishin Sugano
- In an industry filled with fake goods, Goat prides itself in being the middleman, ensuring buyers are sent authentic sneakers
Black Friday 2015 is a date that still haunts Eddy Lu. The post-Thanksgiving shopping event, the biggest date on the American retail calendar, almost broke Lu’s fledgling company, online sneaker marketplace Goat.
Goat, an acronym of “Greatest of all time”, launched in July 2015. The days leading up to that Black Friday had seen poor and even non-existent sales on the website.
So Goat’s Los Angeles-based marketing team posted a special Black Friday promotion on Instagram, with the caption: “This Friday only: get the Yeezy Boost 350 Pirate for retail and other kicks at up to 75 per cent off.”
At the time, the Kanye West-designed Yeezy Boost 350 was one of the world’s hottest sneaker and the post quickly went viral. But almost as quickly, it created huge problems for Lu, 37, and his co-founder Daishin Sugano, 38.
Come Black Friday, so many people rushed to buy the Yeezys that the site crashed, and the still green sneaker start-up became the focus of online rage mobs.
“[The] Instagram post on that day was [receiving] one hate comment a second. There was thousands of comments. One of our investors called us and was like, ‘Is everything OK?’ And I was like, ‘Not really, we're trying to answer all these customer service messages and failing,’” Lu recalls on a recent trip to Hong Kong. But Goat’s worst moment became a defining one.