By: Oscar Castaneda
Brett Topete, ’23 has a three-year business, Certly.Resells, which consists of reselling limited sneakers with the use of softwares.
Brett Topete, ’23 first started Certly.Resells in the industry in June 2020 during the COVID-19 shut down.
The name of this business originates from Topete’s gamer tag as he says , “I just added ‘Resells’ at the end of it.”
He was introduced to reselling shoes by a close friend which attends at Mt. Whitney High. “There was good money to be made at the time. Stimulus checks were coming in so, a lot of people had extra money to spend on shoes and things they like.” says Topete.
Photo Courtesy of Gigantea Staff
In the beginning of starting this business, Topete says he had only his phone to buy and resell shoes off the Nike Sneakers app, waking up in the morning and purchasing any dropping shoe, which later he would resell.
The profit started right away for Topete, as he earned $190 after reselling his first retros. As of now, his profit margins are seeing low, gaining $20-50 from every shoe.
Despite the falling shoe market, Topete has made some pretty good returns.
His business hours depend on his schedule. His hours consist of: Setting up his bots, buy proxies, setting an alarm for the morning, asking any questions all 2 hours before bed time, waking up thirty minutes before the drop time to start up his servers, start the bots, opens his gmail, finally start the task and watch run.
Topete says, “Websites drop shoes – mostly on Saturday mornings. A bunch of retailers will drop shoes that are pretty limited. Then, I use bots to get the items; they ship to my house and I sell them on other websites or to people I know.”
“It gives me a higher chance than somebody trying to get it without bots,” he adds.
One of the biggest wins Topete has had was with an off-white air force, which he bought for $250 and later sold for $1800, making $1,550 in returns. “[It] was a nice payday.” Says Topete. Although, he has had many wins, Certly.Resells has made some pricey mistakes.
Topete is able to beat some of his competitors through acquiring software’s such as ‘bots’, proxies, servers and other subscriptions.
Topete describes the relationship between bots and website designers as a, “game of cat and mouse”. Website developers try to stop bots from being able to pass through, and bots try to find ways to get through those traps and walls.
Proxies are essentially a mimicked Ip address. Topete says, “At home you have your IP address, that’s one Ip (address). One of the bot protection methods is tracking the IP, So if run 1,000 tasks – 1,000 people trying to get the product. They can see that a thousand people are coming from one IP address, they know it’s fake; you’ll get banned. But, with proxies you can generate as much as you want. If I wanna gen[erate] a thousand tasks, I’ll gen one thousand proxies. That makes it one IP address per task.”
Right now, some goals Certly.Resells is working toward achieving are, selling more shoes, getting higher profit margins and getting better connections.
Topete says, “ My biggest lost [was] a bot called Solo.Aio. It was pretty good in its prime; bought it for twenty-two hundred when it was working a lot, but now it’s [value] is at zero.” Along with this bot loss, Topete has had some great flips within the bot market.
Reselling bots is simply selling the software (which helped the reseller sell shoes) after the bot no longer able to by-pass the websites bot blockers . The market place for buying or selling bots is on a discord server. All transactions are online transactions and require a middle man. This middle-man finds you a buyer and double checks the bot (to make sure it authentic) than begins the process while collecting a fee. Currently the Bot Market suffers due to the shoe market being down.
Topete’s biggest win within flipping bots was with a bot called, “Viper”. He bought at eight-hundred and sold at sixteen-hundred then did it again. Bought at twelve-hundred and sold at eighteen hundred, topping a twelve-hundred gain.
Certly.Resells gets its exposure through the platform Instagram and also through connections. Topete says, “They ask and I give the Intel.”
When asked what he has learned about business operations through running his Certly.Resells he says, “I definitely learned a lot; about everything in general. One of the good things, was talking to people – Building connections; A lot of connections – Even in-store; Knowing the workers and stuff. It also taught how to keep track of money. How to record profit, loses and expenses.”
Although Topete is in no want to hire employees, he sometimes works with his friend which introduced him to the business.
When asked how much longer would he be in business, Topete says he would do it until he cannot. Although, that day seems to coming. The business of reselling sneakers has been declining. There isn’t many new sneaker drop and the profit is slowly shirking. If the market continues this way, Topete would consider having to drop it after high school.
When asked what makes Certly.Resells unique from other businesses, Topete says, “I always have new shoes; shoes that just dropped. I sell new hype shoe because I have bots that people don’t have or use”
Topete advises those who wish to start their own business by saying:
“Keep going. Obviously, there’s gonna be some hard times; dry patches. At the end of day you gotta keep pursuing what you wanna do and it should work out in the end if you’re about it. If you’re really dedicated towards it, it should work out.”
Brett Topete, ’23
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