Kickz Da Habbit

By Ryan Ferrell

Local small business owner Tony Hamane of Kickz Da Habbit made a visit to Salisbury High School on Wednesday, Jan. 8th 2020. 

Kickz Da Habbit is a local sneaker resale store located at 1318 Hanover Ave Allentown Pa 18109. The store opened in 2017 and is the first of its kind located in the Lehigh Valley.

Hamane came to talk to students and inform them about what it’s like to run a small business, as well as specifically running a sneaker store. His store, Kickz Da Habbit, allows patrons to trade in and buy used or brand new sneakers from brands such as Nike, Adidas, Jordan, etc., as well as hype streetwear brands like Supreme and Bape (A Bathing Ape). 

He mentioned that the store was run as a consignment store, which means that when a client trades in a shoe and they don’t like the cash or store credit offered to them they can agree to split the profits of the shoe once sold, with 80% going to the client and the remaining 20% staying with the business.

He also talked about “Taking Ls” or the hardships of running your own business. One thing mentioned while talking about this was the difficulties when the store was robbed and the process they went through to make an insurance claim. When making the claim they needed to gather receipts for all of the store’s products to prove they had them and after that, the amount of money they got was the “best market value” and not what the items were actually worth, which was a pretty big monetary loss.

Other than talking about his business, Hamane also brought many coveted streetwear and sneaker items.

Some of the more notable products he brought were both the black and grey Kaws Jordan 4s, the Nike x Supreme Air More Uptempo, Satin Bred Jordan 1s, Yeezy 750s,  Tie Dye Roswell Raygun Dunks, A Supreme x Comme des Garçons Box logo hoodie, every currently released Travis Scott Air Jordan, and many more.

To get some audience interaction, Hamane brought in one fake pair of shoes and hid it amongst the rest. At the end of the presentation he let everyone make a guess as to what pair they thought was fake.  Though no one got it correct, several were very close to getting it right. The shoe that turned out to be illegitimate was one of the 3 pairs of Travis Scott Air Jordan 1 lows. He compared the fake to a real pair and showed ways to tell a fake from a legit pair of shoes.