 Some guys, we are in Shanghai, China right now for another episode of Fun Bros on the street. We are the very first sneaker con to ever come to mainland China. And we are here to ask people, experts, international people, tourists, whoever, why do Chinese people love sneakers and streetwear so much? Let's find out. The Chinese people are the biggest hypebeasts and sneakerheads in the world. Yeah, of course. We got like muscle monies. The biggest thing is in the trend, we got money to buy. What I've seen today, 100%, genuinely, this is the biggest sneaker event I've ever been to, first of all. And the fact is everyone's so passionate here about what they're doing, you know, it's crazy. I think it's just because of the money. Hey, now we can afford everything, so let's do it. Oh yeah. Let me tell you something, they definitely got the population. The dollar sign demands respect, and they got a lot of those. You know in the States, Yeezys are seen as overlooked and everything here, anything is overlooked. Like, it does not matter. A Supreme Box logo, $5,000 on your body, it's another sweatshirt. I think the market is huge and the people are crazy. Wanted to devour wise, yes. What are some of the most popular sneakers that they're buying in China? Jordan 1 Red Shoes, I did at Yeezys, we saw over 10,000 pairs like Yeezys. Do you have any theories on how Chinese people got so much industry wear? I think it's like with the Russian, when they were like a communist party, they were like, okay, everybody dressed the same, and now they go crazy with Versace and stuff, they have to show that they can. I think it's a lot more with the hip-hop culture recently, especially like rap China and music shows with Chris Will and all these influences. The real thing that messed it up was the whole Louis Vuitton Supreme, man. A few years ago, it wasn't like this. That broke the market. That was a gateway, they were on designer first, Supreme and Louis Vuitton dropped, and then they were like, ooh, now let's get into the streetwear. Social media and K-pop. 2012, Jordyns were just sitting. A week later, you saw, it was like in a music video. Came back and just sold out. You see like ASAP with the track pants. Everyone wants to wear the track pants. It's like I want to buy it to like fit into a certain crowd. What's the difference between a Chinese sneaker head and an American sneaker head? US sneaker head is just like, they know the culture. I mean for a Chinese sneaker, it's like, say more about like what's hot in the market right now. They are people that don't know anything, just follow the trend. But I'm as a Jordyn fan, I think we appreciate the stories behind. They're buying it now, but there's a large population that really just wants to learn about dunks, wants to learn about SBs, wants to learn about like signatures. People aren't afraid to experiment here, which is amazing. Which is something we don't really have in the US that much. Like outside of big cities, people just kind of wear whatever. Like honest, I'm not really, I'm wearing a f***ing Hanes t-shirt and some APC jeans. That's it. The Chinese way that they really mix every hype brand together. They don't wear basic. They never go to Zara or H&M and buy a basic shirt. No way. Even the undershirt got a brand, right? Yeah, yeah. Don't you go buy an underwear. The Chinese are not basic with the hype-beast style. Now, give me your rating on the Dragon Ball Flight Positive One. I mean, just based off Dragon Ball, it has to be five out of five. Shut up, man. Five? Five, yeah. Your favorite shoe that you want to buy, the Pornhub AF1. Because they endorse me, I got to say the five out of five as well. MCM Travis Scott One. I'm going to say a one out of five because I think Travis Scott Ones are so great on their own that you do not want to touch them. Naruto Foam One. All right. Because Naruto is the second greatest anime of all time following Dragon Ball, it has to go four out of five because the work is not done that great. But I like the concept, so four out of five. One piece, Foam One. Based off this design, I'm not really feeling how it looks. I'm going to have to give these a three out of five. Timberlain Air Jordan One. Oh, man. If I was in New York right now, you'd see me with these joints. Yarrg! Five out of five. These are clean. I like them. This collaboration was the best done. I actually think. The Louis Yeezys. I got to give these a zero out of five because it's looking straight at it. It just looks mad fake, you know? Oh, man. The Bugs. The Looney 2 1s. If they put Lola on here, these wouldn't win her right here, man. Shout out to Bro Shoes though. I love the customization. I think sometimes people are like, oh, you can't do that. You can't do this. I mean, why not? Hey, man. You just got to be creative. Everything is a work of art. So whatever you do, as long as you put in your passion into it, it's great. What's changing about the whole Made in China term? Listen, with the Hire Brothers' Made in China song, that's going to help. And I just seen this article about people basically taking ownership of that Made in China stereotype and everything, putting it on shirts in a dope way. People know quality comes out of here, too. As long as Nike's still making their stuff here in China, they're going to be all right. There's this Chinese designer, Feng Cheng Wang. Her whole collection, it just says Made in China. Taking that negative connotation, being like, hey, look, it's made. And you're still going to rock it. It's good quality. Coming from America, we only hear about the American customization companies, but this one's really big, called Banu. Let's check it out, guys. This is like a traditional Chinese monkey king print. It's like they put plastic on top of it. All right, so they souped up backpacks, too. Air-joining ones. OK, these look like the fragments. But, man, the quality here is crazy. Like, everybody can get everything nowadays, and everybody has everything. So when you see something like this that kind of takes on this off-white inspiration on this Air-joining one, it's crazy, because it's like, you've never seen this before. And it's not like these people just painted the sole or something. They literally are rebuilding and restitching the upper. And I'm sure these customizations cost a lot. Yo, these shoes, what the f... These are the actual Banu shoes. I've seen Chinese guys carve pagodas out of carrots. You don't think that they could do a nice job on Air Force Ones? OK, something else that I noticed here is that there's a lot of American brands that are well-established in America that are trying to rebrand themselves completely here in China. For example, we're here at the Cat Booth. This is the construction company. Construction worker is not like a fashionable brand in America, although it's funny, because everybody always wore construction boots. So I think this is where Cat's going with it. They're coming up with, like, flying it. Construction boots. I don't even know if you could wear these to work because they ain't got the steel toe. I've never seen. That is hilarious, actually. Put some construction. Y'all want some construction boots? You want some construction boots? I got you, camo, yellow. American brands are coming to China to rebrand, like, Cat over there. That construction brand is, like, trying to be cool. What do you think about that? A good example is, like, how Carhart does work in progress. And it's like, hey, let's cater to a more lifestyle-oriented, where we can show our strengths. So it's, like, footwear. It's durable. You can wear it outdoors. But at the same time, let's give it to another audience. The positioning is very different because the history and the kind of culture that in US, sometimes it didn't transfer over to China. Like a fresh start? Yes, it was a fresh start. What do you think about the reputation in China for, like, fakes? Nowadays, the reselling price is really high. Some of the people, we don't have that much money to buy it. But we love the styles. But, like, in China, we got factories to produce those fake ones. You got the same styles. But fakes in China, it could look almost exactly the same. Americans, like foreigners, they also buy fakes. So you can't just say, we must stop it. You can't stop it. Deen from the outside is really bad. We have crazy stuff. We have supreme Yeezys. We have off-white Balenciaga. So they mix everything together. But we have to understand that these things are not meant to make for Western people. When is it OK to wear fakes? So many real sneer hats. They're only looking for real stuff. If I'm a local customer, of course, I can follow 175. But the market is over 1,000 right now. Of course, for local people, they can't afford to go on shoes. What do you think about that fake supreme store, the Italia? It's so embarrassing. Now we're here with our friend J, aka Shanghai Soul. How is the Chinese sneaker market different than the states? I would say there's probably five big things that are totally different. Number one, I would say that the resell market right now. Right now, we're talking about resellers in the states a lot. People are saying, oh, man, the resellers got all the product. In China, it's like that times 10. Because before, resellers in China were really trying to buy expensive goods, like bags and clothes, Louis, Gucci, and all that kind of stuff. And that's where they saw profits. But now, they're starting to understand that sneakers are high in value. So before, for someone like me, I would be able to maybe go up in competition with you guys when we're going to a sneaker raffle. Maybe 1,000 people would try to enter a raffle. But now, that number is probably like 6,000, 7,000, because all the resellers are in it too, and they're trying to make a buck off of sneakers because it's such a profitable market. And that was going to lead me to point two, which is that a lot of the people in the line-ups nowadays is like the resellers are just paying people to go line up. They're paying people to camp out. Manual labor out here is so cheap. Like, they'll be literally picking homeless people off the street and giving them 300 kui, which is like 45 bucks, to go camp out outside Nike Lab for seven hours. And another point was how we buy sneakers out here. Like, I know in the States right now, people are using StockX and Goat the most probably. And out here, we got some really similar. It's called Poison, Du in Chinese. You can buy straight off their website, just like StockX. The seller ships it to Du for Poison to get authenticated, and then you get the shoe within a week and a half, two weeks, something like that. It's the exact same thing. But they also do authentication separately on its own as a separate thing. So if you were to sell me a pair of shoes on another app, on another platform, and I wanna make sure that they're legit, I can take pictures, everything. Box, toe, shoelaces, tongue, soles. You gotta take everything out. You gotta show the stitching. You gotta show, if you got a receipt, show that too. And then I send those pictures to a third party to get it verified. And then they'll say, yeah, you know what? These are legit. You can pay that dude now. And so that's something that's totally different from what StockX does, because it doesn't have to be sold on their platform. But they get paid for doing the authentication process as a separate entity. I definitely think it speaks to the adoption that China has had about like mobile apps, such as, you know, you can pay all your bills and do everything through WeChat, just like you can authenticate your shoes, probably essentially through WeChat now. You know, the fourth point I was gonna talk about is the celebrity culture out here. It's not quite the same as what, you know, whatever Justin Bieber's wearing, or whatever Kanye's wearing. You know, there's some celebrities out here in Asia where people literally wanna copy the entire fit from head to toe. You know, a good example is a celebrity in Hong Kong, Sean Yu, Edison Chen. You know, whenever they post a fit on Instagram, it's not their own brand necessarily. It could just be, you know, like a North Face jacket with some new balances. And literally the next day, that look is mimicked and copied everywhere. There's a lot of people out here that have money, but they don't really know how to put an outfit together, right? And so when they see an Edison rock a fit and they're like, man, I like that look. So you know what? I'm just gonna copy that exact look because he's putting it together for me, right? You may not have the fashion sense to like throw on this jacket with, you know, the quarter inch pants and whatever, but then they see someone famous rocking and they're like, oh, I could do that. I'm gonna go in there, I'm gonna try to copy that exact fit. It's like just copying whatever closes on the mannequin. The last point I wanted to make was that the fake culture, you know, everyone in the States, you know, when they see something made in China that they always raise an eyebrow, like, is this legit? What's going on? You know, even when I post on my IG when I tag Shanghai China, I mean, that's the location I'm in. But the second I post a photo, people are like, yo, those are fake. Fugazi, I don't believe it, whatever. Those probably cost 30 cents, whatever. And you know, in some ways that is the reality, right? But I feel like for the kids and then for a lot of the people coming up in the sneaker game out here, fakes is the only way that they can try to be like someone from the States. You know what I mean? And so when I hear those comments or when I see people like wearing fakes, like I don't necessarily think that it's a bad thing. Like it kind of brings, it kind of devalues the sneaker game a little bit. But for those people, that's the only way that they can try to feel like they're a part of something. You know, they may not have $1,000 for a pair of Travis Scott's. They may not have $4,000 for a pair of Mars Yards, but if they can get it for 150 and they can feel some kind of way, then they're gonna do it. I gotta be honest, in the States, definitely wearing fakes is a huge no. But I know that the Chinese market is different. Obviously, a lot of fakes are even made in China. But I definitely think, and it took me a while to kind of, to understand that. Because at first I was like, I would never wear fakes. And I still probably would not, but I think for the sake of spreading the culture, you need to make it accessible. Like some places, the fakes are getting so good. What's to say that this isn't the exact same thing as the real pair? I mean, they got Yeezy's out here. They got Ultra Boost out here with the straight up, same boost from Bass F, the same German company that makes the boost for Adidas. There's definitely real material in some of those fakes. Oh, for sure. And just because Factory A sells to Nike, they may still get the mold to Jordan 1's to Factory B and Factory B just releases them out to the public. Like who's to say that that's a different shoe just because it doesn't have the Nike stamp of approval on it? It's, I mean, it's crazy, man. It's really crazy. Sometimes I think it's sending a message to the people who are actually spending all that money. It's sending a message to all those rich people out there being like, amen, look at that Paul over there. She rocking, she rocking Jordans too. Yeah, that's right. Hey, there's so many times where I'm walking on the street and there's literally a guy pushing a mountain of Styrofoam, mountain of plastic, Yeezy 350s, man. I'm just saying, I'm just saying, man. Like he looking kind of hot. Hey, hey, Kanye did say he wanted everybody in the world to have a pair of Yeezy's. And guess what? It might happen in China. There's going to be a decent number of people who understand the Chinese market that are going to watch this, but also a lot of people who don't and are going to write off the Chinese sneaker economy just like, oh, they're messing the game up. But what can help them start to understand what's going on out here? What people don't understand is that people out in China got money, man. Like it's not just, you know, rickshaws and people picking tea leaves and fakes, you know what I mean? Like people will be moving mad product out here. And people need to understand that the sneaker industry is starting to realize that. I mean, you look at how many Chinese New Year themed shoes are coming out every year. Adidas does it, Puma does it, Nike does it. Like everyone's coming out with Chinese theme because the companies in the States, they're actually trying really hard to get in here. They're trying to tap into what China has to offer in terms of creativity and obviously money. All right, cool, man. Yo, Jay, thank you for the insight. Appreciate it. Back to SneakerCon. What do you think it'll take for China to develop domestic brands? I think we need more situation like this that the people coming from abroad showing that business can be run in a different way, not in the old way, that they just take other stuff and do as much as possible. Other Chinese designers, you know, that obviously studied abroad, they don't say abroad now, they're bringing it back home. So I really respect that. I like that for the Chinese people. The Chinese trying to make their own cutting, their own design to fit into the streetway culture. I think that's the changes. Believe in your own people. Gotta like your own people. Are there any Chinese shoe brands that are coming up that can also, you know, are making their name on the global stage? Feng Shuan Wang for sure, and Sun Quan's. Linning. Myself, I started looking to Linning more. Linning is the number one Chinese brand? Linning. They're doing good. Which one? D-Wade. I like the CJ McCallum shoe. Dude, that CJ McCallum shoe is hot. I'm gonna go with Linning. I think Linning has always been like the older and bigger brand. I mean, they signed D-Wade. That's like one of the craziest, you know, signees of all time, especially in the Chinese industry. It has been fascinating to be here. There are so many Chinese domestic brands that are doing cool stuff, whether it's collaborating with the Western brands or doing their own version of customization or just having their own product like Entron, which is obviously a direct competitor to an Encrape. I just think it's cool to see domestic Chinese products. And shout out to those other brands, but it's not just a Jason Mark booth or Crate Protect booth in China. These are domestic Chinese products. Yo, it's so crazy. Actually, we're recognizing a ton of people from LA that we've seen at this event. So I guess it speaks volumes on how international it is. You know, obviously you look at all the different partners that they have here. SneakerCon Shanghai, man. My favorite shoe out right now, the Shanghai 97 No-Bias. I just love this color. Looks like a Pokemon. Looks like a Lapis come to life.