Over the past few years—when the pandemic hit, New Balance 800, inflation soared, and people turned to running for exercise—the price of a workhorse pair of running shoes—the Asics Gel Kayanos, the Brooks Ghost, and Nike Pegasus hit the $140 mark (or higher).
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From Runners World for On 300 Running in the Cold before the foam on the latest shoes start to lose their bounce, and if you run 25 miles per week, you’ll need a new pair every 12 weeks, to the tune of somewhere between $560 and $660 per year.
Enter Relay. The e-commerce marketplace launched in the early summer of 2021 and provides some price relief to runners who are putting in the miles—or those who are curious about new offerings but don’t want to pay top dollar to try them out.
Relay’s big idea: Take shoes that have been returned to brands or online retailers, pick out the best ones (they never have more than a mile of running on them), and resell them at a discount. They also sell never-worn older models that have been on the market for more than a year and are taking up shelf space that newer models will need to occupy.
How much can you save? It depends on your size, what you’re after, and how picky you are about color.
For example, in late September, Relay was offering the previous version of the Asics Gel Kayanos—v12—for $79.99, while a few pairs of 11s were $64.99. Some current Brooks Ghost 15s were $104.99, while the 14s (very limited stock) were $79.99. This Running Shoe Can Help Your Neighborhood Grow 29s were $79.99. There were only a few pairs of Nike, Hoka, and On to choose from—but stock changes daily.
An idea before its time
Relay’s founder and president, Patton Gleason, started his career in running specialty retail, crouching over runners’ feet, then trotting to the stockroom and coming back carrying five shoe boxes stacked on top of one another. He was a manager of a Luke’s Locker location, a chain of well-known running stores in Texas.
Over the past few yearswhen the pandemic hit minimalist movement. (Its success was minimalist.) Then he turned to consulting and logistics services for brands and stores that were beefing up their online sales or working with Amazon, helping them manage their excess inventory.
He saw online businesses struggling to cope with their mounting returns. “Once an item has been returned to a manufacturing or distribution center or even in the back of somebody’s stockroom, for all intents and purposes, it has kind of lost its value,” Gleason told Runner’s World. “Demo Run: On Cloudmonster Hyper.”
What’s more, he realized that many shoes were in mint condition. Maybe a customer opened the box and decided he or she didn’t like the color. Maybe the box had been damaged in shipping, but the shoes inside were pristine.
“If I was working in a store and this came back, I would 100 percent start training in this, because it was so good,” he said.
As that volume of returns grew, he wondered if returns could be another revenue source for his company and its partners.
In 2018, he and a couple of industry colleagues put together their pitch for Relay: Sell us your returns, we’ll resell them to consumers, and then we’ll use that revenue to be able to provide your logistics and operational services to you for free or at a very low cost. Wins all around.
Unfortunately, the industry insiders didn’t see it that way. “We quite literally got laughed off of calls,” he said. “We had a really slick pitch. But it was like going to Mars. They couldn’t get their brains around it.”
The pandemic changed everything
Gleason put the idea on the back burner. When Covid hit in 2020, online sales of everything soared. So did the returns of goods. People started trying everything on at home, instead of at a store. “Home has become the new showroom,” Gleason said.
Across the athletic footwear industry, he says, 15 to 22 percent of all online purchases get returned.
In 2021, supply chains continued to be in knots. Shoes weren’t getting out of Asia. But brands had warehouses full of returns. Chris Farley, owner of five Pacers Running stores in the Washington, D.C., area, and an authorized dealer for brands selling on Amazon, had heard Gleason’s pitch three years earlier.
“When I first heard about it, I thought, ‘That’s a brilliant idea,’” Farley said. “We didn’t know at the time that business was going to go completely digital for months at a time and there’d be many more returns.”
Farley called Gleason and asked him to dust off his business plan. They got permission from brands to run a pilot program. With the returns they had, plus a few additional pallets of returns that brands sent, but very little marketing, they had their first handful of sales. Customers trusted them enough to enter their credit card numbers.
Within a week of their soft launch, Gleason said, they knew it would work. Now they’re in business together, with Gleason running day-to-day operations, and Farley leveraging his ties with the vendors.
What are you getting, exactly?
These days, Relay has more than 30 full- and part-time employees working out of its warehouse in Richmond.
When shipments of returns come in, employees do several sorts. Everything gets scrutinized. Shoes that have obviously never been put on feet, about 20 percent of the returns they receive, get set aside to go back to brands or online retailers so they can sell them as new.
For everything else, Relay employees examine the upper, the tongue, the sock liner, and the midsole to make sure the shoes have 99 percent of their life left in them. They check for defects. Gleason calls it doing “an appraisal” on the value of a shoe.
“There are a lot of running nerds here,” Gleason said. “We ask, one, would I run in this? And two, if a spouse or a parent or friend ordered this, and knowing what I know, would I think they got a great value? You can only [determine] that when that’s all you’ve done for a decade.”
Shoes that are in decent shape but don’t pass muster for sale on Relay’s website get donated to charity partners. The rest get recycled, helping the running shoe industry improve its sustainability.
Anything that’s good enough for resale gets gently cleaned and reboxed into a Relay shipping box that’s in the shape of a shoebox, lessening the environmental impact. “It seems crazy to put a shoebox inside a poly bag or another cardboard box,” Gleason said. “It’s unnecessary.” Orders received by 3 p.m. ET go out that day, via UPS.
Relay doesn’t undermine specialty retailers, Farley says—the customers aren’t the same, for one. Many people don’t want a 99 percent new shoe that’s refreshed; they want a brand new shoe. Also, specialty run shops don’t get the returns that online sellers do, because their staffers do an expert job of fitting customers.
Getting up to speed
While Gleason keeps the sales numbers private, he does say Relay is profitable and has not had to rely on outside investors. Once they hit the two-year mark in June, business really started to take off.
This reporter recently got the thrill of a good deal with a pair of Asics Gel Cumulus 24s—the last pair in a size 10—for $59.99.
The subsequent email from Relay shows how seriously they’re taking the endeavor. “Your purchase just helped to make the athletic footwear supply chain more efficient, more sustainable, and more generous,” it read.
Gleason has recovered from the bruising his ego took in 2018—and now radiates passion for the business, talking faster than the shoes are going in and out of the warehouse.
“It’s been nothing short of remarkable,” he said. “We think we’ve come up with a really good solution. We’re learning more every day about the best way to find the highest value and best use of every single unit of surplus inventory. It’s been really exciting, super rewarding, and we’ve learned a ton.”
Sarah Lorge Butler is a writer and editor living in Eugene, Oregon, and her stories about the sport, its trends, and fascinating individuals have appeared in Runner’s World Asics Gel Kayano, Run Your Butt Off! and Walk Your Butt Off!
