When His Dad Died, He Took His Grief to the Mall and Shopped Sneaker Sales. Now His Hobby Is a $10 Million Side Hustle. Vernon Simms just needed something to fill his time. Now, he's making thousands a month — and sharing his strategy with others.
By Frances Dodds Edited by Mark Klekas
How many hours have you spent mindlessly shopping sales online, filling up your cart with items that you don't really need… but you're saving money if it's a sale, right?! Well, what if you could actually make money on your sale-snooping — instead of losing it? That's exactly what Vernon Simms has spent years figuring out how to do, and he's sharing his playbook here.
It started all the way back when Simms was in high school in Virginia, working at the shoe chain Finish Line in the mall. "I would use my employee discount to get, you know, shoes, basketball, jerseys, hats, and I would sell them on eBay," he says. Then I would use that money to go to the movies or buy clothes, just so I didn't have to get money from my parents."
After high school, Simms went to college to study business for a few years but "didn't really know what I was going for." He wanted to go to music school, so he moved to Florida to try to make it happen, but his parents wouldn't pay for it and he couldn't get a loan. So he found himself in a kind of limbo, working odd jobs — including picking up shifts at the local Finish Line. He supported himself as he started to build a career in the music industry — producing and eventually becoming a national DJ, traveling all over the country to play clubs on the weekend.
A few years later in 2015, Simms was living in Atlanta, and decided to get a pair of the Steph Curry Under Armour sneakers. "When I got them, I was like, hmm, I wonder if I could sell shoes again," he says. "And so, the next Jordan that came out was this Air Jordan Retro 12 Blue Game shoe. I bought it and listed it on eBay. When it sold I was like, okay, I'm going to do this during the week."
So that's what he did. On the weekends he'd travel and DJ, and during the week, "I'd go to the Nike store and hunt the back wall," he says. "That's where all the sales shoes are – without the top – really cheap. I knew that, okay, Jordan's sell, Air Max's sell, it just depends on what price point I get them at. Air Maxes are a $120 shoe, so if I'm buying it for $30, I know I can put it on eBay and probably sell it for like $80."
In a sense, Simms was offering shoppers a service. He was doing the grunt work of shopping the back wall, and cutting them a deal for his time. Pretty quickly, his operation became more sophisticated. He discovered a site called StockX, which he describes as a "stock market of things." It's an app that lets sellers list designer items like shoes and clothing, but also lets buyers make "bids" on items they're looking for — essentially "in search of" posts with a price they're willing to pay. Buyers and sellers don't have to take pictures of their items, like you do on eBay, or write descriptions. It's meant to move much faster.
"As a seller, if I have the shoe and I see that someone's willing to pay $100 for it right now, I could sell it right there on the spot," Simms says. "I can sell it while standing there in the store before I even purchase the shoe. I just click the button. It's an immediate transaction, whereas with eBay you have to buy the shoe, take pictures, wait for someone to buy, or put up a bid. You could be holding a shoe for a week."
The way that StockX ensures quality control is that all merchandise goes from the seller to the company for authentication, and then StockX sends the products to the buyers. And as Simms started to do more business, he was pleasantly surprised when he got a call from leadership at the company, asking how they could help him. Bulk shipping would be awesome, he told them, instead of having to send StockX each box of shoes individually. "My whole kitchen would be full of 40 boxes of shoes." Not long after, StockX implemented bulk shipping and Simms was off to the races.
But around this time, in 2017, a tragedy happened in Simms' life. His dad passed away, and it was a devastating blow. "My dad was like my best friend," Simms says, "He was really supportive of me and we would talk every single day." The rest of Simms' family was dubious of his shoe hustle, and thought he should get a "real job," but he says, "My dad was the only one who was like, no, you know, do your thing."
Simms remembers telling his dad about his goal of making $10,000 in profit a month — which at the time, seemed like a stretch. But when his dad passed away, Simms needed something to fill his days. "Instead of being home and crying about it, I would go out to the mall. Every single day, all day," he says. "And I would just buy shoes. That's when I really figured out the recipe. It was like, okay, the more you go out here, the more shoes you buy, the more money you make. So I just started going crazy. I was selling so much."
The month after his dad died, Simms hit his $10,000 goal.
"I felt like that was him, helping me, showing me the way to do this," he says. "And ever since then, it was $20,000 a month, then $30,000." While he continued shopping in person, he also started buying in bulk online. And he was selling on multiple platforms: Amazon, eBay, Go, StockX, Mercari, Facebook Marketplace. Now he also has wholesale buyers. On StockX alone, he says he's made $4 million. In total, across all websites, about $10 million.
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These days, he's moved out of his condo and bought a house — where he lives with his girlfriend, who banned shoes in the kitchen. "She was not having it," he says. "She was like, we're not going to have a whole bunch of shoes around here." He laughs. "And I said, you know what? You're right." So Simms got a warehouse space for his shoes, though he does still stash some boxes in the garage from time to time.
He says that for anyone trying to get in the sale shoe game, his best advice is to go to the back wall, get out your StockX app, and start looking at what the shoes are going for. "Go to the store and scan a shoe, and you can look at the history of what it's sold for for the past five, six, seven years," Simms says. "Just start learning." And just maybe you'll make a sale, right there in the store.
