A 27-year-old has sold over $4 million worth of sneakers in 2024 by shifting to 'live selling.' She explains how it works and why every store owner should learn the skill.
Courtesy of Val Zapata
- Val Zapata turned her sneaker-collecting hobby into a seven-figure business.
- She scaled her business by leveraging the live-selling platform Whatnot.
- Zapata predicts a live-selling boom in the US and advises honing live-selling skills for success.
When Val Zapata reconnected with her childhood hobby of collecting sneakers at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, she didn't intend to make money.
Finding unique sneakers on marketplaces like OfferUp and Facebook was a way to decompress during a stressful time. If she made money by flipping a pair, that was a bonus.
The more she bought and resold, the more viable the business became — and it was a lot more fun than her day job working as a life insurance broker.
"I was like, 'Okay, I can't leave work right now, but I need to figure this out because, obviously, I love to do it,'" the 27-year-old told Business Insider.
In 2021, she created an Instagram account, The Shoe Game Co., and gradually ramped up her side hustle.
"We started selling five or 10 sneakers a day, and then I just started doing basic math," said Zapata, who was living at home with her parents at the time and working on the shoe project with her dad. "How do I make five grand a month? How many sneakers do I need to sell a week? Can I do $10,000?'"
She says she eventually plateaued selling on Instagram: "It became a really large workload for not a lot of reach. I was trying to sell the same sneakers to the same rotation of clients who had already bought those sneakers from me, maybe even two or three times. There was a moment where I couldn't really push past that breaking point on Instagram."
Shifting to live selling changed everything.
Scaling to seven figures using the live-selling platform Whatnot
Zapata first heard about a platform called Whatnot in 2022. She had established a habit of following major players in the shoe industry by watching their YouTube channels, and one of them mentioned selling on Whatnot.
She downloaded the app and learned that it's a marketplace that allows sellers to host live shows and sell products in real time. She joined a show, and it was unlike anything she'd ever experienced.
"It was crazy. There were shows that were happening with 600, 700, 800 people. People were buying things in under three seconds," she said. "It was like Facebook or Twitter met eBay. It was so much fun when I started watching, and I was like, 'Oh man, I would be really good at this.'"
She applied and got approved to sell on the platform, but didn't start hosting shows immediately. She shadowed a friend who was also starting to do live Whatnot shows.
"It was like a crash course of what to do and what not to do," said Zapata.
Still, her first show was "mayhem" — and not profitable. "I made like 50 bucks. I was probably negative after the boxes."
Courtesy of Val Zapata
Her dad encouraged her to stick with it, comparing it to his line of work: selling cars.
"My dad knows that an F-150 in Houston is going to get the most activity, whereas, you might not get that same activity in Nevada. He's like, 'You're going to figure out what they want, what they don't want, and what they will bid for,'" said Zapata. "Slowly but surely, we started making 3%, 4%, 5%, and then one day we made 15% And then one day we sold $25,000 in a day."
Most of her sales now come from live Whatnot shows. In the beginning, she was hosting daily. She and her dad turned the game room of their family home into her studio.
"We've gotten a little techier now, but at the time it was just my iPad, so I could see the chat, and my iPhone, so the chat could see me," said Zapata. "I had a little desk ring light. It was probably 15 bucks on Amazon. The backdrop was a couple of racks of sneakers."
While her current streams are shorter one- to two-hour "power hours," in her first few months on the platform she'd go live for multiple hours at a time. "I would wake up so fried from eight or nine hours of really high intense energy, because we bring the show, and my dad would have set the stream back up, my background would be perfect, and that was just his way of continuing to encourage me."
After just one month on Whatnot, Zapata says she did enough in sales to quit her insurance job in September 2022.
Her company has expanded to offering streetwear and has brought in up to $500,000 in sales in a single month. BI viewed her Whatnot seller dashboard and confirmed that her business has generated over $4 million in sales so far in 2024.
Predicting a live-selling boom in the US
Zapata, who leads a team of eight employees and rents a 6,000-square-foot warehouse to store inventory, aspires to run a seven-figure monthly operation. She believes her current sales strategy can help her achieve that goal.
"Live selling has just now started. We're at the tip of the iceberg right now," she said. "This is a big thing in other countries. This is not a big thing in the US. It's about to be massive. We're going to have streams that have 10,000 viewers, and that's going to be a small stream."
Her advice to any online or brick-and-mortar store owner is to develop the skill of live selling. While Zapata has had success on Whatnot, there are other live-selling platforms like Bambuser, Channelize.io, Facebook Live, and YouTube Live.
She honed the skill by observing top sellers.
"If I wasn't livestreaming I had someone on in the background — someone that I admired, someone that I liked the way that they spoke to the chat and the way they sold their sneakers," said Zapata. "I would ask, 'Okay, what are they doing?' They're doing intros, they're interacting, they're really getting creative with the things that they're giving to their community. They're taking the time to educate."
She's learned that sourcing good sneakers is just half the battle. She could get an incredible deal on a unique pair, but it doesn't matter if she can't sell them.
The more she can educate her buyers, the more successful she is.
"Holly might come on and say, 'I love that pink sneaker,' and bid. But if I tell Holly, not only is this a really cool pink sneaker, but this is a 2020 collectible from Kobe Bryant, Holly might be willing to pay a little bit more," explained Zapata, who starts every product at a dollar during a live show. The highest bidder takes it home. "But if I don't know and don't share, then they're just consumers bidding and trying to get a good deal. So I learned very early on that I have to bring knowledge to them."
She also spends a lot of time reading reviews and making adjustments based on what her buyers are saying.
"When I look at my reviews every morning, I'm like, 'This is no good. We have to fix this. We have to figure this out,'" she said, adding: "When you're your own boss, you're your own motivator. You lead yourself."
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