GOT ’EM — SNKRS Generator
Background
Sneaker culture is something I’ve participated since I was in high school around 2009. Over the past couple of years people who have bought Nike shoes have typically used an app called SNKRS that’s available on the app store. Every time there’s a sneaker drop, there’s a massive amount of people on twitter that talk about how unfair the app is or how we hardly ever really get an opportunity to buy something we actually want.
Part of this difficulty is in part due to how sophisticated buying bots have gotten over the past few years. For those that aren’t familiar, there are bots and applications that people run that automate the buying of coveted sneakers. It’s been a business for a while, and a lot of resellers use these bots to make a good return on investment.
Aside from not getting the opportunity to get a pair of sneakers you really like… what bothers me is that the discussion has shifted from “would you wear” to “would you sell”. Since no one expects you to wear a sneaker that has tripled in value since you’ve bought it, the shoe has become meaningless, and the screenshot of the SNKRS app saying you “GOT ‘EM” has become a new form of social currency. Even if you wear the shoe, it’s considered blasphemy to wear a sneaker that has increased in price. It’s shifted sneakerhead culture from being about the admiration for the shoe, the story, and the design, to a “hustle 24/7”, “I gotta protect my investment” mentality.
Bobby Hundreds recently had a great NFT post on instagram that talked about this.
Introducing https://got-em-generator.glitch.me
This past Sunday I spent about an hour or so making a mock of the GOT ’EM page SNKRS is famous for, and added a feature to let users add their own pic, and modify the shoe description. Feel free to add whatever image/video you want. None of the images are saved, nor is the text saved, it’s just modifying it on the site temporarily. After you’ve uploaded something, refresh the page to start over.
The entire site took about an hour of coding on Glitch.com. Feel free to remix it here. The tricky part was making a hidden input field, and when you click on the image, it clicks on the hidden button that then prompts the user to pick a file for upload. The rest of the site is standard html/css.
Some test images…
