What is fashionable continues to be investible, according to a new report from the online marketplace StockX, which shows that some streetwear collaborations between high-end brands and industry staples even outperform the S&P 500.
Collaboration continues to be king when it comes to items that are bought, sold, and traded on StockX. Out of the top 10,000 apparel and accessory products on the marketplace, nearly a quarter of them are collaborations between two or even three brands. Supreme, Louis Vuitton, Nike (NKE), Bape, Dior, Comme des Garçons, Adidas (ADDYY) and Jordan Brand are just some of the big names that have collaborated on sneaker and apparel offerings in the past few years.
According to StockX, there is a 60% average price premium for designer collaboration products. One such example is the Bape x Coach bucket hat collaboration which has seen a 1,680% spike in searches on the platform.
The KAWS x Uniqlo collaboration T-shirt collaboration has been a massive hit in the fashion and investment worlds. Originally priced at $15, the shirt now fetches $240 on the marketplace.
“It’s really a testament to the success of that collaboration,” StockX senior economist Jesse Einhorn tells Yahoo Finance.
“This was obviously something we’ve looked at before, which is treating these products as kind of investment assets and measuring how they perform. And we found that these KAWS Uniqlo tees actually outperform traditional equity markets when it comes to their price appreciation and their value,” he added.
Einhorn notes that for younger consumers such as Gen-Z, investing in streetwear is at times more appealing due to its tangible nature. He tells Yahoo Finance that these streetwear assets have the benefit of two different types of value.
“One is investment value, but another just as important is cultural value and potentially consumer value. You can’t wear a stock, you can’t display a stock. You can’t brag about owning a stock on your Instagram — or if you do, people might look at you funny — but you can do all those things with a KAWS x Uniqlo tee right?,” Einhorn asks.
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“You can flex about it on your IG. You potentially wear it if you’re willing to kind of sacrifice some of the value. You can put it on your wall as a collector's item. So to the extent that these new asset classes function in all of these different ways, and have both cultural as well as financial value, it really sets them apart from traditional equities,” he said.
Reggie Wade is a writer for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter at @ReggieWade.
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