Jordan memoriabila and sneaker sales are seeing a major uptick after a documentary about Chicago Bulls star Michael Jordan
If Michael Jordan were a stock, analysts would have a buy rating on the former basketball icon.
After the airing of the ESPN and Netflix documentary „The Last Dance,“ sales of nearly every product associated with the six-time NBA champion are soaring to new heights.
In an online auction at Sotheby’s, an autographed pair Air Jordan 1s sold for a record $560,000 on Sunday, setting the new world auction record for any pair of sneakers and attracting bidders as young as 19 years old.
„We saw tremendous bidding up until the moment the sale closed, with the value more than doubling in the final hour alone,“ said Brahm Wachter, Sotheby’s Director of eCommerce Development. „That, coupled with strong international bidding from six countries on four continents, shows not only the incredible appeal of Michael Jordan as one of the most recognizable and legendary athletes of all time, but also that sneaker collecting is truly a global and growing market.“
It has been nearly two decades since the 14-time NBA All-Star retired in 2003. While Nike’s Jordan brand sales continue to rise — the brand had its first billion-dollar quarter last December — a new generation is growing up without ever having seen what many consider the greatest basketball player of all time.
As the highly anticipated footage from „The Last Dance“ finally made air, it has helped revive everything associated with the Jordan brand. The 10-part documentary aired to record ratings and has reignited the conversation about Jordan. Twitter said that there were more than 11 million Tweets were about „The Last Dance,“ as the series aired. At the conclusion of the final episode, 20 of the 30 trending topics related to the documentary on Sunday night.
The newfound popularity has led to companies like StockX seeing record-breaking sales. The Detroit-based secondary sneaker marketplace said since the premiere of „The Last Dance,“ an unsigned version of Air Jordan 1s are selling on the site at an average price of $7,123.
