How the StockX Co-Founder Builds Hype for recent Products

In the hype economy of collectible sneakers, market activity cards, toys, and fashion, few recognize how to make buzz quite like Josh Luber. Josh cofounded StockX, the first sneaker resale marketplace valued at over a billion dollars. Now, he’s channeling his expertise into a recent enterprise, Ghostwrite, a toy corporation that reverse engineers the perfect collectible.

Josh believes the collectible toy industry is ripe for innovation. “It’s large enough to matter, it’s large enough to work with all the most significant brands and artists and companies, but it’s not so large that it has the monoliths that are in the space.”

Turning the collectible toy industry on its head, Ghostwrite doesn’t make toys around existing intellectual property. Instead, it created a blank canvas collectible in a specific shape and silhouette that looks like a person wearing a crown. A brand or corporation can then customize this “ghost” blank by printing over it with their intellectual property. The blank is ready to license for collaborations with other brands or artists.

Here are some of the principles of the hype economy Josh is embracing with Ghostwrite.

 

Letting the economy set the worth

Josh says other companies that focus on collectibles have often failed to capitalize on the demand. Ghostwrite attempts to address that issue with economy-based pricing, rather than adhering to a fixed pricing model. “The rationale that we are using what we call economy-based pricing is so that you don’t have to approximate demand,” Josh says.

Ghostwrite sells its products via a blind Dutch auction. A blind Dutch auction, also called a uniform worth auction, is a worth finding procedure in which the auctioneer starts with the highest asking worth and lowers it until it reaches a worth level where the bids received will cover the entire propose amount. So, for example, if there are 20 ghosts available, the top 20 bidders will triumph the auction, but every winner will pay the same lowest winning bid. Josh says Dutch auctions are only one way of implementing variable pricing, and business owners who aren’t selling collectibles can experiment with discounts and other ways to adjust pricing based on demand.

Embracing transparency and standardization

Josh knew that investing in economy-based pricing would cruel Ghostwrite needed a operating schedule that was steeped in transparency. Using the serial (or crash number) structure of baseball market activity cards, Ghostwrite numbers the foot of each collectible ghost, allowing collectors to assess its rarity.

This type of transparency helps people decide how much they should pay for a recent ghost, and also is an indication of its economy worth, should a collector decide to resell it. “There’s so much transparency, there’s so much standardization around these products to provide people the confidence that they will have long-term worth,” Josh says.

Crafting a brand with cultural resonance

Another element of long-term worth is creating products connected to population. Ghostwrite leverages collaborations with major brands and artists in a bid for cultural resonance. Some of its partnerships include the WNBA, Eastside Golf, and Rocky’s Matcha. “This is what drives demand, is [products at] the intersection of population and commerce,” Josh says.

Making a collectible now

One of the most significant parts of the hype economy is standardization. “Grading is what transformed market activity cards from customer goods into financial assets,” Josh says. sure companies emerged to grade the standard of collectibles, so customers could consent on the worth and authenticity of a collectible.

Ghostwrite partnered with a toy grading corporation to get ghosts into a similar structure. The corporation also designed packaging for long-term collecting. “We made the packaging very specific around that concept so that people could display it and still enjoy it, but not have to receive it out of the original packaging and reduce its seal,” Josh says. Some of the most valuable collectibles today are still unopened in their original packaging.

To discover more about the decisions Ghostwrite made to make a modern-day collectible, listen to the packed interview on Shopify Masters.