Shownotes
The Black Cement Jordan 3 is high regarded as one of the best Air Jordans of all-time. The release of the 2024 retro has been nothing short of controversial. The stories of lacking quality and inconsistency beg the question of whether sneaker lovers should voice with their wallets more loudly going forward. Matt checks in with his thoughts.
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Transcripts
The Jordan 3 black cement is one of the most iconic shoes of all time and it recently retroed.
Matt Fraits:How did it go?
Matt Fraits:We're going to talk about it this time on Fire Footwear.
Matt Fraits:Welcome back to Fire Footwear, everybody.
Matt Fraits:As always, this is your host, Matt Fraits.
Matt Fraits:I hope that this finds you well.
Matt Fraits:I want to, as always, thank you for coming back to this podcast or if you're brand new, welcome to the Fire Footwear community.
Matt Fraits:I hope everybody who celebrates here in the United States and honestly, just everywhere, I hope you had a great Thanksgiving weekend, a Thanksgiving holiday, specifically those of you in the US That I know celebrated last Thursday, I know some of our Canadian friends celebrated a couple of months ago.
Matt Fraits:Wherever you are and however you spent this weekend, I just want to say out front that I'm thankful for you.
Matt Fraits:I'm thankful for the time that you give to this podcast and I'm just thankful to have the kind of platform that I do, the life that I have.
Matt Fraits:There's many things, including this podcast, that make my life great.
Matt Fraits:My wife, my son, my friends, a lot of things.
Matt Fraits:And I'm thankful for all of it.
Matt Fraits: ontinue to treat you well and: Matt Fraits:But we're here to talk about the Black Cement 3.
Matt Fraits:Now, this isn't something that I was actually going to talk about quite this way.
Matt Fraits:As you know, I'm a big fan of cultivating history around here.
Matt Fraits:I do think that it's important to talk about shoes like the Black Cement 3 in a way that remembers where we came from.
Matt Fraits: obviously debuted in: Matt Fraits:And the reason being is because the Jordan 2, while we look at it a lot differently Today, the Jordan 2 was a shoe that nearly lost Nike Michael Jordan.
Matt Fraits:The Jordan one was great.
Matt Fraits:Michael Jordan got hurt.
Matt Fraits:The Jordan two tried to basically get into exclusivity.
Matt Fraits:It tried to get into luxury goods.
Matt Fraits:And it just didn't work at the time for a basketball shoe.
Matt Fraits:Fast forward to today and it probably does work.
Matt Fraits:Back then it didn't.
Matt Fraits:And so Nike had to take a real risk in order to get Michael Jordan to be convinced to stay with the company.
Matt Fraits:It was difficult enough to get Michael Jordan to sign with them in the first place.
Matt Fraits:Now they had to keep him after a disappointing release.
Matt Fraits:So if you think about it they really had to find something to get him there.
Matt Fraits: guy who had hit a home run in: Matt Fraits:And that was Tinker Hatfield.
Matt Fraits:Tinker Hatfield was given the keys to the kingdom, the keys to this Ferrari.
Matt Fraits:And they said, you are going to save this brand.
Matt Fraits:And Tinker Hatfield, the story goes, basically went to Michael Jordan and said, what do you want in a shoe?
Matt Fraits:And what came out of all of that was the Air Jordan 3.
Matt Fraits:And more specifically the Black Cement 3, which is the one that I think everybody thinks of when they think of the debut of the Air Jordan 3.
Matt Fraits:Obviously there are other OG colorways.
Matt Fraits:The White Cement 3 is another iconic one.
Matt Fraits:We all know the history here.
Matt Fraits:And that's what I originally wanted to talk about.
Matt Fraits:I wanted to talk about the fact that the elephant print overlays and all of that stuff, that aesthetic had never been seen before.
Matt Fraits:And that is really what makes that shoe iconic and what makes it one of the most, or at least probably the highest selling Jordan ever.
Matt Fraits:And you have the one, the three, the four, those are probably some of the most popular.
Matt Fraits:Let's throw the 11 in there too.
Matt Fraits:And so every so often, what, five or six years or so, Jordan brand goes back to the vault and they pull out some of these OG color of these iconic shoes that they know are going to sell very, very well.
Matt Fraits: It happened in: Matt Fraits:So for the Black Cement 3, it seems to be about every six years or so that we get a true proper retro of the Jordan 3 black cement.
Matt Fraits:And so sneaker culture has been very excited about this for a while.
Matt Fraits:There's been a lot of buzz and the release came about.
Matt Fraits:Now the release came about with a shock drop, which is always a good thing, especially in today's world when we know about the shock drops.
Matt Fraits:Now, I know that I've probably talked about that and said, well, how can you call it a shock drop if we know about it?
Matt Fraits:And at this point, I've just kind of come to grips with reality that social media is going to ruin a lot of these things that beforehand we would have never known about.
Matt Fraits:So the shock drop comes and it gives people an opportunity to cop a shoe that they really want.
Matt Fraits:Many people out there probably own at least one retro of the Black Cement 3, if not more.
Matt Fraits: it, but you at least have the: Matt Fraits: I did have the: Matt Fraits: he shoe that I saw, I had the: Matt Fraits:And while I appreciate the shoe for what it is, I appreciate it for where it is in history.
Matt Fraits:Probably one of my hottest takes is I don't think that the black cement Jordan 3 is one of the best shoes of all time.
Matt Fraits:I know many people feel that way.
Matt Fraits:I know a lot of people are probably going to gasp, maybe even clutch their pearls, hearing me say something like that.
Matt Fraits:But that's the thing about sneakers, right?
Matt Fraits:Is we don't always have to like the same thing.
Matt Fraits:That's something I've talked about a lot on this show over the course of this year, is that you should like what you like.
Matt Fraits:And if you don't like a shoe or you don't want to pay money for a shoe, just don't go after it.
Matt Fraits:Trust me, plenty of other sneaker people are going to go after it.
Matt Fraits:So the Black Cement three drops is a shock drop.
Matt Fraits:People start getting their pairs and you start hearing some rumblings, some whispers about the fact that this release was not good quality.
Matt Fraits:One of the things Jordan Brand seemed to really hone in on in this release, and it's something that I think that they've tried to hone in on a lot more over the last couple of years, especially after watching people like Chris from Wear Testers talk about the fact that they can't get the shape right as it relates to the og.
Matt Fraits:And you'd think to yourself, I wonder why that is.
Matt Fraits:So Nike and Jordan Brand have gone back to the drawing board to try to make sure that the shape is as close to the OG as possible.
Matt Fraits:And then the big release happened.
Matt Fraits:People were able to cop pairs.
Matt Fraits:Obviously, some pairs made it to the outlets, but there's a little bit of a difference between being in an outlet these days and being at outlet prices.
Matt Fraits:To me, the Nike outlet really isn't an outlet anymore.
Matt Fraits:It's just a way for Nike to put more merchandise in front of us and make us think sometimes that we're getting a deal, when in reality we're paying retail, if not very, very close to retail.
Matt Fraits:And now people are getting their pairs en masse.
Matt Fraits:So you're seeing a lot of people on social media, you're seeing a ton of people on YouTube reviewing this shoe and across the board.
Matt Fraits:The through line that I have seen is that quality is very, very down on all of these pairs.
Matt Fraits:While the shape is amazing and a lot closer to the og, which is great for the historians out there.
Matt Fraits:When it comes to the actual quality, the actual execution of the shoe, many, many people are very disappointed in the pairs that they got.
Matt Fraits:And we saw this before another iconic shoe, the Air Max 90 Bacon, which is one of my favorite colorways of all time.
Matt Fraits: t shoe was retroed kind of in: Matt Fraits:And the quality of that was very, very bad across the board.
Matt Fraits:And at the time, I remember, I think I even had this podcast, I remember talking about the fact that listening to a lot of people talk about that shoe and complain about the things that they saw on that shoe, it very much was reminiscent of the way that other kinds of sneakerheads talk.
Matt Fraits:And that's really where I want to get into kind of the meat of what I want to talk about here.
Matt Fraits:A lot of the complaints that I have seen have talked about quality of materials, and they've talked about the inconsistency in the quality across the board.
Matt Fraits:And I think that that's a fair criticism.
Matt Fraits:I think that if you're talking about the kind of money that we're paying, and this release actually shines a very, very bright light on the fact, and it's something we've talked about a lot here and you hear in other places is that these sneaker brands are asking more and more of us.
Matt Fraits:And not just in the fact that they're giving us more shoes to choose from.
Matt Fraits:They're asking us to pay more and more money every single time.
Matt Fraits:Even within a given year, one silhouette like the Jordan 3 could go up $10.
Matt Fraits:And I think what they have assumed is that we are so embedded in this culture that we are so into sneakers that we're just going to pay it blindly.
Matt Fraits:And the numbers are not proving that.
Matt Fraits:The numbers are showing that Nike has had to pivot in a lot of ways.
Matt Fraits:They've changed CEOs for that mere fact that they have lost, what, billions of dollars because sneakers have taken a downturn.
Matt Fraits:Now, Nike is obviously an athletics wear brand, but at the end of the day, when we're talking about sneakers, a lot of people love sneakers today.
Matt Fraits:And so when you go back into the vault and when you go back and take a piece of history like the Jordan 3 black cement, in my opinion, the details matter.
Matt Fraits:And you have to make sure that you get the details right.
Matt Fraits:And when we talk about bad materials, when we talk about inconsistent elephant print, and when we hear a lot about other quality control issues that have come out of the Nike warehouse, it begs the question of this global brand, this iconic brand, not just Nike, but Jordan Brand.
Matt Fraits:Also, how can they not get their quality consistent?
Matt Fraits:That's something that I don't really understand.
Matt Fraits:Now, this other group of sneakerheads that I'm talking about are people that really or solely live in the fake sneaker space or the replica space.
Matt Fraits:I've been very open about the fact that I do think that it's important for me to know what's going on there.
Matt Fraits:But I remember one of the turning points for me when I was embedded in that was looking at all the comments on Reddit about shoes that people posted and they wanted a quality check of the shoes that they were going to get.
Matt Fraits:Now, a lot of people who maybe don't know this, what happens in the replica market is you have some type of a supplier, whether it's a middleman or whether it's directly from a factory or directly from a seller who can get it at a lot cheaper of a price.
Matt Fraits:You place an order and before that order gets to you, you are shown pictures of the shoes that you're actually going to get.
Matt Fraits:And you'd think to yourself, well, how do you know that you're going to get those?
Matt Fraits:Well, a lot of that market actually self polices itself.
Matt Fraits:So if you're going to bait and switch people, word is going to get out very quickly.
Matt Fraits:So for the most part, any seller that's worth a damn is going to show you the actual shoes that you're going to get.
Matt Fraits:And one of the reasons that this happens is because it allows the customer, somebody like me, to look at the quality of this shoe, at least as it relates to stitching and the way that things are embroidered and just making sure that things are even.
Matt Fraits:I remember thinking to myself, I just want to make sure that the shoe that I'm getting is as close to retail as possible, but also doesn't look like something that I actually made in my attic.
Matt Fraits:That was kind of my standard.
Matt Fraits:But I noticed that a lot of people in that market were doing what I thought was nitpicking about these shoes.
Matt Fraits:They'd be like this little stitches off here.
Matt Fraits:This midsole seems like it's a little bit darker than it should be.
Matt Fraits:And it got to the point where the minutia of the things that people were pointing out were so ridiculous that it made American sneakerheads seem so picky and just seem so kind of bougie compared to a lot of the international people that were buying there.
Matt Fraits:And the reason I bring this up is because I realized something.
Matt Fraits:Listening to people talk about the black cement release, listening to people talk about the quality issues with it, the inconsistency with it.
Matt Fraits:I realized that we're all kind of the same.
Matt Fraits:And I've realized that no matter what market you traffic in, what you really want at the end of the day is that whatever brand it is that you're buying from, whether it's from Nike and Jordan brand, or whether it's from some middleman in China, you want to make sure that your hard earned money is going to translate into the best quality product that you can have.
Matt Fraits:And today, whether we like it or not, sneakers do represent clout for a lot of people.
Matt Fraits:That's no shade on anybody who feels better because they have shoes that other people don't.
Matt Fraits:But you also, if that's something that you do, you want to make sure that the shoes that you have in your collection are as good as they can be.
Matt Fraits:Because when you are showing them off to other people, you never want somebody to look at them and say, man, this shit is whack.
Matt Fraits:And that's the truth.
Matt Fraits:Whether you're buying retail, whether you're buying fakes, that's what you want at the end of the day.
Matt Fraits:And one thing that I've noticed that these fake replica sellers, whatever you want to call them, actually strive for, for the most part, is making sure that the quality is high because they know that their business could suffer because of word of mouth.
Matt Fraits:The difference here is that Nike and Jordan brand, even though it seems like they're striving for that consistency, the execution of it from release to release doesn't happen.
Matt Fraits:And that is a problem.
Matt Fraits:And it's a problem because they don't think that we actually care about that in a way that is going to put any type of a dent into their bottom line.
Matt Fraits:And that's kind of what I want to talk about even more here is that we have an opportunity sometimes as sneaker heads, to really make a difference in this market.
Matt Fraits:But I think that we have been conditioned to not sit things out because we feel like we're going to miss out and we feel like we're not going to have something that maybe other people are going to have.
Matt Fraits:But The Black Cement 3 should tell you something.
Matt Fraits:It should tell you that we should ask for more from these brands.
Matt Fraits:We should not just assume that they're going to get it right and we should not just assume that, well, this is the only time I'm going to have to get it, so I need to make sure I spend my money on it.
Matt Fraits:If it's not worth your Money, no matter where you're getting the shoe from, you shouldn't buy it.
Matt Fraits:And we as consumers should make sure that that message gets sent loud and clear to Nike, to Jordan brand, to Adidas.
Matt Fraits:It doesn't matter what the brand is.
Matt Fraits:We should be telling them with our words and more importantly, with our wallet that we want better and the Jordan 3 black cement deserved better.
Matt Fraits:Just because it's not a shoe that I like and just because I don't have this particular iteration of it doesn't mean that I can't go to real sneaker heads.
Matt Fraits:The people that I called the boots on the ground and get their real feedback, their honest feedback.
Matt Fraits:That's something I've talked about in the show earlier this year, too, is the fact that Nike and Jordan brand, they really need to get people like us in the lab, in these meeting rooms, get real feedback.
Matt Fraits:And they would learn that the Jordan 3 black cement is so sacred in this space that they can't mess it up.
Matt Fraits:And they've messed it up big time.
Matt Fraits:And we as the consumer, we should be telling them loud and clear that we are not going to stand for this.
Matt Fraits:And with that, let's get to the release of the week.
Matt Fraits:Release of the week, where I like to highlight a shoe that has caught my eye.
Matt Fraits:It's not always hype.
Matt Fraits:It's just something that I want you to know about.
Matt Fraits:So we talked about the Black Cement 3 being iconic and something that we remember today.
Matt Fraits:Well, something else that was iconic were the Seattle Supersonics and if you recall, in the 90s, Sean Kemp, Gary Payton, there were some really good Supersonics teams and teams that could have won the NBA Finals if not for Michael Jordan existing.
Matt Fraits:So on December 7th, Nike SB Dunk Low Sonex Colorway.
Matt Fraits:This is an absolutely fire colorway of the Nike SB Low, especially for people like myself who remember those teams and just it's something that is nostalgic to me.
Matt Fraits:It makes me feel a certain way and brings me back to those times.
Matt Fraits:And I think if you're of a certain age in sneaker culture, you have those memories.
Matt Fraits:So December 7th is your time.
Matt Fraits:It's probably going to be 120, $130 on the sneakers app.
Matt Fraits:It's going to be tough to get.
Matt Fraits:But you know what?
Matt Fraits:You should go out and get it because the Supersonics were fire.
Matt Fraits:These shoes are fire.
Matt Fraits:This gum sole, amazing execution.
Matt Fraits:I can't wait to try out for it.
Matt Fraits: in: Matt Fraits:And how do you feel about the idea that we should be more vocal to these companies about the lack of quality and consistency with their releases, let me know.
Matt Fraits:Hit me up on Instagram.
Matt Fraits:Irefootwearpod is the handle.
Matt Fraits: -: Matt Fraits:Whatever it is, I'd love to play it on a future episode.
Matt Fraits:YouTube Fire Footwear Sneakers Talk with Matt Frates I'm going to be putting up some reviews pretty soon and hopefully we can get back to some consistent content both in audio and in video.
Matt Fraits:I appreciate everybody's time.
Matt Fraits:I hope this finds everybody well and safe as I always do and I'll talk to you next time.
Matt Fraits:This is Fire Footwear.
Matt Fraits:The opinions and viewpoints expressed on Fire Footwear are those of Matt Frates and his guest and not necessarily those of the Maddie Ice Media Network.
Matt Fraits:Fire Footwear is exclusively owned by Matt Freights and is brought to you by the Matty I.
