Is Nike still cool with kids? Kids' resale data, and what Nike's retail prices really did since 2019

A thread about Nike's stock drew hundreds of replies this week. Two claims came up again and again: kids don't care about Nike any more, and Nike has priced itself out while Hoka, On, ASICS and Saucony take its customers. We can test both against recorded sales.

Our data is resale: what sold on StockX and GOAT, not what sold at Foot Locker or on Nike.com. That limits what it can say. It is where kids' "must-have" shoes show up, though. And StockX lists each shoe's retail price, so we can follow the same model's price from year to year.

Kids' sizes: still a Nike market, specifically a Jordan market

StockX labels kids' sizes the same way for every brand, GS (grade school, roughly ages 8-14), PS (preschool) and TD (toddler), so we can split its sales by size group. Grade school is the useful one here, because those are the kids who pick their own shoes.

• Nike and Jordan hold nearly nine in ten grade-school resale sales, much more than their share of adult sales, and that did not slip year on year. The same holds for February to August: 86.3% in 2025, 89.4% in 2026.
• The kids' business is Jordan's. About two in three grade-school pairs traded were Jordans. The top five grade-school models last winter were the Jordan 4 (28,242 sales), Jordan 11 (14,108), Jordan 12 (7,309), Nike Ja 3 (6,733) and Jordan 5 (5,451).
• Where Nike did lose ground: the Dunk. The Dunk Low fell from 10,163 grade-school sales in November-January 2024-25 to 4,512 a year later.
• The challengers are ASICS and New Balance, not Hoka or On. The ASICS Gel-1130 (4,839 sales) and New Balance 9060 (2,354) both made the grade-school top 12. Hoka and On sold 26 pairs in kids' sizes on StockX across both winters combined, out of about 250,000.
• Preschool and toddler sizes went from about 51% to 68% Nike and Jordan. That is mostly UGG's winter boom fading (32.6% of little-kids' sales to 14.9%, see when UGGs sell the most), not Nike gaining.

Kids' Nike releases also resell better than adult ones. Of the 99 Nike kids' releases in our resale vs retail study, 69.7% resold above retail (95% interval 60-78%), against 41.4% of 1,396 adult Nike releases. For Jordan, kids' and adult sizes were about the same (33.2% and 32.2%).

What this does not show. Resale is the hype end of the market. A kid wearing Hokas bought at a running store, or Sauconys from a family trip to DSW, never shows up here. So the fair conclusion is narrower: among the shoes kids and parents chase on resale, Nike, through Jordan, is as dominant as it was a year ago. Whether Nike is losing everyday kids' shoes at retail is a separate question our data cannot answer.

Did Nike raise prices faster than inflation? Mostly not

StockX lists a retail price and release date for each shoe. We grouped general-release colorways (no collaborations, special editions or kids' sizes) into fixed models and took the median retail price by release year.

For comparison, US consumer prices rose 25.9% from 2019 to 2025 (CPI-U, annual average), and the footwear CPI rose 6.7%. Nike's big retros mostly rose less than general inflation, so they are cheaper in real terms than in 2019. Most rose roughly in line with footwear prices overall (+6.7%). The clear exception is the Air Jordan 1 Low, up 39% from a $90 base.

Price still matters, just not in the way the thread framed it. Two of the biggest non-Nike sellers in our data are cheap and have not moved: the Samba OG and Gel-1130 at $100 since 2022, against $120 for a Dunk Low and $125 for an AJ1 Low. The pattern also shows up in resale: releases priced $150-199 resold above retail least often of any price band (39.9%).

None of this explains Nike's stock on its own; resale and retail list prices are a small window on a company that reports tens of billions of dollars in revenue. Our sneaker stocks page tested whether resale moves called Nike's share price and found they did not.