Source: Basketball Shoes
Q4 has done the easy part, they made kicks. While most people think that the hardest aspect of creating a sneaker company is designing and getting the product from the assembly to the warehouse, the reality is that’s the fun part. The brand has also made inroads with professional athletes which gives them credibility. What it doesn’t do however is guarantee sales. I can’t and won’t pretend to know how many shoes have been sold by Q4. They’ve redesigned their website and as of right now there are very few broken sizes evident on the site. I expect that. When you make a shoe you typically have to make a minimum of 1200 pair. Q4 has over 8 active colorways and styles:
495 Lo
495 Hi
Specialist
NForcer
Millienium
In some instances if you have a relationship with the manufacturer you can make 600 pair. The first shoe I made under SHO-SHOT I made 1200 pair of shoes. 600 in black and 600 in white.
This post isn’t really about Q4 as much as it is about brands like Q4, Anta, Li Ning, and Puma. Footwear is no longer the way it was 20 or 10 years ago. When the sneaker craze started sneakerheads, and regular people, wore sneakers for the activity they were created for. People then began to take those shoes and wear them daily. The basketball sneaker became fashionable. In the last ten years the introduction of brands like CLAE established what has now become athleisure. Sneakers were designed and utilized strictly for fashion. Performance footwear was no longer worn as fashion except as a retro shoe that no longer served the purpose they were created for; think Stan Smith or Air Jordans. What does this have to do with the brands I mentioned at the start of this paragraph? Anta and Li Ning, as well as 361 and Peak, are Chinese brands attempting to utilize NBA players as a means of gaining a share of the sneaker market in their own country. This is a marketing tactic that works as China is infatuated with basketball like sneakerheads were in the 90s when sneakers became a part of the everyday outfit. A company like Q4 is born in the US and has launched a basketball line first and they are attempting to capture the hearts of kids in the U.S. and internationally. Just recently the team for Q4 traveled to China:
Recap from Q4’s stop at Active Kids in Shanghai. @langgalloway10 @etwaun_55
📹: MyBaller TV pic.twitter.com/Ghnqc749vI— Q4 SPORTS (@Q4SPORTS) July 31, 2018
Q4 also recently sponsored a travel basketball event during the live viewing period. The brand is taking all of the right steps to begin introducing itself to the next generation of ballers. The end game of course is finding a way into the closet of young ball players. To do so Q4 has the same problems that Anta and Puma have although they all have professional ball players wearing their gear, they have to get beyond Nike and Jordan in the hearts of young ballers. That’s a task no one has figured out. They also have to gain the interest of a group of people who only wear hoops shoes for hooping not really walking around in. Basketball isn’t really fashion and of all of the brands I’ve mentioned Puma is the only brand with any recognition in fashion.
So why does Q4 need a serious grassroots approach? The brand sponsored the #PrimeEvent which was open during the viewing period. As a former head coach I know that many who read this site aren’t familiar with terms like “live event”. The NCAA grants colleges specific times in the spring and summer to go out and actively visit and recruit athletes. These events are given the term “live”. The more popular events are sneaker affiliated. Nike EYBL, adidas Gauntlet, and Under Armour Association are run by the grassroots programs of their companies. The teams all wear their brand affiliations at these events. It creates a division in youth sports that often leaves the best athletes unable to compete with each other and it leaves college coaches scrambling from one gym to another. What is also a problem is that these “Big Time” live events leave out the majority of players and colleges. There are levels from JUCO, to D3, NAIA, D2 and D1 colleges who can’t travel. These schools are also not sponsored by shoe companies. The majority of high school teams are also unsponsored. Q4 sponsored an event, but it wasn’t a “Q4” event in the same way as Nike EYBL. It was a great start for a young brand that will encounter many of the same problems I encountered when I ran Sho-Shot. Below is a tweet from the Prime Event sponsored by Q4.
Puma Active Sports Graphic Ανδρικό T-Shirt @Q4SPORTS HARIBO × PUMA SUEDE TRIPLEX & WMNS SUEDE & WMNS SUEDE MIX & RS-X3 @Metro_Boston 💪 #PrimeEvent @PBRhoops pic.twitter.com/pP0KDrZdy7
— Zero Gravity Basketball (@ZeroGravityBB) puma clyde hardwood men shoes
Q4 and all of the other brands are making sure to sponsor as many basketball related events as possible. Why? Basketball remains the only sport where the athletes are celebrated individually and are immediately recognizable. This is why sneaker companies gravitate towards those players and give them endorsement deals. Brands begin grooming kids as early as 8 years old. A Nike kid will typically attend a Nike college and then sign with Nike when they make it to the pros. The problem today is a pro doesn’t guarantee that your brand is going to sell a shoe in the U.S. Anta has a three time NBA champ and All Star and no one has seen anyone rocking a pair of KT3’s. It’s equally as hard finding someone rocking a pair of Way of Wade Li Ning’s. Those shoes however are Chinese brands. Q4 is an American made brand attempting to navigate and gain ground. To do so the brand will have to step back and consider doing what I did on a much larger scale.
In order to get colleges and high schools interested in Sho-Shot footwear and apparel I didn’t target Nike EYBL level players. I took the time to scout and recruit guys who were good enough to go to college but were overlooked. From 2004 to 2010 I sent over 100 players to college on basketball scholarships via my own All-American camp and website. At the same time I got 9 colleges into Sho-Shot uniforms and the players who attended my camps all got a pair of kicks which was included in the cost of the camps along with a highlight video and e-mails to colleges.
The picture above is from one of my All American camps. Those are my uniforms and this picture was taken at an angle to show only my shoes in the foreground and in the background with the white pair. This picture went into a magazine that was sent to every college coach on my e-mail list. That magazine featured a ranking of the players in attendance. More important this camp led to a deal with several colleges who recruited some of the players from the camp, including the college that hosted the event for me, Southwest TN. College, that picture is below. What was even better was that uniform that my campers took back to their schools led to deals with their high schools who ended up buying uniforms.
Now, I realize that this post has become about what I did from 2004 to 2010, but if you’re a brand and you’re looking for access into the players’ lives it will have to happen at the lowest level via grassroots. You will have to build the brand. Signing athletes is nice, but Sonny Vaccaro stated clearly that the players are the best advocates for the brands. Over the course of almost 5 years I built Sho-Shot into a brand that was featured in Dime Magazine, Bounce Magazine and on Madison Square Garden TV. Now, not a lot of people heard of me or the brand, but that wasn’t the point. My goal was to get uniforms on teams at both the high school and college level and to find a player who would eventually become a pro. I was well on my way to doing this when the rug was pulled from under me because the brand I thought I owned was a license extended to me by the actual owner. At any point the owner could come in and get rid of the brand and that’s exactly what happened. I was in the middle of making a new basketball shoe. I had players getting tattoos of my Sho-Shot logo because I had helped them get scholarships. I had also extended the camp from Memphis into 5 other territories. One of those areas was Mississippi where I was able to build a profile that finalized the recruitment of Isaiah Canaan to Murray State. Isaiah then went on to play in the NBA before having a horrible injury this past season while playing for the Phoenix Suns.
I wrote all of that to make it clear that simply signing an athlete to your brand for a basketball company is not a problem solved. Q4 Sports has done a great job in an incredibly short amount of time. One thing that is apparent is that they have the financial backing, but sometimes it’s not money that fixes a situation. I paid for everything with Center Court Basketball out of my own pocket on a college professor’s salary. It was the definition of a bootstrap venture. It took years to find the right potential player who could have worn my gear, but the license was removed and CCB and Sho-Shot dissolved and I eventually started the site you’re on reading this now, JmksportStore. No one has ever replaced the work I did in grassroots. There isn’t a website around looking out for the kids who aren’t the high profile names. I had several players who went on to play D-1 basketball who wore my Sho-Shot Eclipse shoes for years after those camps. They weren’t rich kids or well off kids. They were humble kids who couldn’t afford a 200 dollar basketball shoe or even a 150 dollar basketball shoe. They were kids from Mississippi and Arkansas. There were enough of them that combined with my own hustle I sold 1200 pair of an unknown sneaker and ended up with teams in high schools from Memphis to San Diego and colleges from the CIAA to NJCAA teams wearing Sho-Shot uniforms (including the number one ranked JUCO team in Howard College, TX).
Q4’s sponsorship of the Prime Event is an excellent start. However, if they, and the other brands really want to make a difference and connect, instead of spending big bucks on signing NBA players, they should consider allocating some of the marketing money available to a local grassroots director who is willing to run a website that will function in the same way that Center Court Basketball did.
