General Discussion - February 07, 2016

(reposting this from /r/expensivehumanfashion)

Been really jonesing for a pair of Common Projects as of late - hoping to cop a pair of the grey or off-white Achilles mids or the Dover Street Market white lows. I really don't like the low white ones that everyone seems to dig; they're just too meme-y for me (and besides, what would people think if a mod of /r/mfacirclejerk was caught wearing actual CPs instead of LE GLORIOUS CP ALTERNATIVES??? /s).

ANGRY RANT BEGINS

But living in Canada makes this desire a real chore. The typical advice of 'oh, wait until the end of the season and buy them on sale' doesn't work when the only models that actually go on sale are the much less popular ones. Ordering from outside Canada is basically impossible at this point, thanks to our weak-as-shit dollar and sky-high customs fees (we get charged on anything over $20 - I paid nearly $50 in customs [including HST and handling fees] on a $125 shirt a month ago). Plus, we seem to have almost no standardization in pricing on the damned things - Four Horsemen has the lows at $480 (not totally godawful) and Roden Gray has them at $605 (are you fucking kidding me?).

The reasonable answer, then, is to find equivalent-quality sneakers from Canadian companies -- i.e. wings + horns and... um... yeah, how about those wings + horns, eh? Yet somehow American buyers seem to be getting better sales than we do! Great! And because the USD is doing relatively well, American buyers buy from our stores at a ~28% discount (in addition to a high customs minimum and NAFTA for anything made in Canada), depleting our stock and making it even harder to find cool shit for ourselves. I'm sure the stores themselves are doing great on the USD -> CAD conversion, but it doesn't really get passed along to the buyer, especially not with Canadian-based sites like East Dane charging even Canadians in USD.

/r/rawdenim Thread