On Aglet's mobile game, players compete to collect virtual versions of rare sneakers in a "Pokemon ... [+] Go"-style contest.
Over the last four months, Niall McGuire has taken 2.38 million steps, some 1,200 miles. Or rather, some 2,000 kilometers as the 24 year old in Congleton, England thinks about it. Custom Aglet Letter
He’s done this to play Aglet, a new location-based game best described as Pokemon Go for sneakerheads. Each step earns currency, Purple Aglet, to spend on a vast array of virtual sneakers available in the app, versions of actual items from Adidas, Nike and other brands. Like many Aglet players, McGuire has gone a step further and spent cold hard cash—about $75 in his case—on Gold Aglet, another in-game currency for acquiring the rarest shoes in the game. Using both currencies, he has so far acquired 117 kicks, including several grail pairs, like the Yeezy Boost 350 Beluga V2.
He is still averaging about 130,000 steps per week, enough of a distance to take a toll on his iPhone, which feeds the mileage information to the app. “My battery life has been affected by it,” he shrugs.
He’s surely not the only one. Since launching in April, Aglet has become an under-the-radar, cult favorite pastime for shoe enthusiasts across the globe, some of the popularity undoubtedly fueled by the fact that everyone is out walking a lot more today than before the pandemic. This surge has defied even the most optimistic of the company’s initial projections. “Before Covid-19, we thought if we can just get 5,000 super excited players [daily] that’s it: Mission accomplished,” says Aglet founder Ryan Mullins. “But instead we got 20x that.” A total of 300 sneakers have been released in Aglet, many of them available in quantities of no more than one, mimicking the fashion world’s limited-edition drops.
Aglet users are gladly paying up to play, too. More than 20,000 of them have plunked down cash for Gold Aglet, a purchase ranging in price from 99 cents to $99.99. Nearly a dozen has spent several thousand of dollars each. Meanwhile, a thriving 1,200-person Discord group devoted to Aglet regularly chats long into the wee hours of the night, showing off their Aglet collections—“flexing their shelf” so to speak. Several users have sold off their holdings via Discord. And a couple fans have extended their passion for Aglet into the real world and have tattooed the company’s logo on themselves. Unsurprisingly, this user enthusiasm has attracted the attention of investors. In July, Los Angeles-headquartered Aglet raised $1.8 million at a $10 million pre-money valuation from Comcast-backed Forecast Fund and Index Ventures, among others.
“Sneakerhead culture is now firmly in the mainstream in a way that it wasn’t even five years ago,” says Daniel Gulati, Forecast Fund’s founder. “And there are different ways to play that trend.”
Before Aglet, Mullins, who on LinkedIn describes his modus vivendi as “making the world a stranger place,” tried his hand at several other startups, including a mobile reading app. From 2017 to 2019, he worked at Adidas as its “director of future trends,” spending time thinking about what could come next in apparel and shoes. From his point of view, “the whole industry has flatlined and needs CPR,” he says. “Virgil Abloh said recently that streetwear is dying. So what does this industry look like in three years? My answer to that is what Aglet is trying to do: ... combining fashion, gaming and software. Those are three of the biggest opportunity spaces.”
To play Aglet, you start by downloading it on an iPhone—it’s currently unavailable on Android devoices—and choosing between three pairs of white sneakers: Stan Smiths, Air Force Ones and Chuck Taylors. While playing Aglet, your digital self wears a pair of these digital sneakers, and as you walk, the shoes wear out. The deterioration encourages continued play and continued acquisition of more shoes. As in real life, not all Aglet footwear is made with the same quality. Some wear out faster, some generate more Aglet currency than others. A map provide a guide to check-in points and treasure chests containing the in-game currency, items to restore the condition of used Aglet sneakers and giveaways to actual, real-life shoes.
In Raipur, India, Raghav Verman, 16, has been averaging 20,000 to 30,00 steps a day on Aglet from his family’s gated community, good enough to earn some of the best footwear. (“I’m a fan of the Yeezys,” he says.) Raghav has played the game enough to know the exact price of the goods by heart. Example? “The Jordan Royal 2001s—66,000 Aglet,” he says, not missing a beat. In Amsterdam, Mike Vanwalraven, a high school student about to enter his final year, has become a moderator of the Aglet-focused Discord group. “It’s exciting to be in the Discord, especially on Drop Day,” when the app releases new shoes to buy. “Everyone’s going crazy. It’s really nice to see.” Vanwalraven has largely stopped collecting but only because Mullins, while sorting through data on the most active users, noticed Vanwalraven’s accumulated mileage and offered him an unpaid internship.
Aglet hasn’t signed any licensing agreement with the companies that make the real world versions of the sneakers offered in its app. In many ways, Aglet is fortunate that those multi-billion-dollar corporations didn’t immediately pulverize it out of existence with copyright litigation.
They may still turn out to be business partners. Mullins says Aglet is currently negotiating sponsorship deals with several of the big shoe companies. He’s mum on the details, but offers up a few vague examples of what these partnerships culd look like: Maybe branded-spaces throughout Aglet’s map. Or perhaps an Adidas discount code stashed in an Aglet treasure chest. “In the virtual world, the marketplace is huge. You can scale anything onto your platform,” says NBA player Andre Iguodala, who joined the VC firms as an Aglet investor last month.
Personalised Aglets Then there is an additional side to what Mullins hopes to build. Later on, he intends to enable designers to create their own sneakers within the app and sell those goods there. It is Mullins’ hope that the custom products created within Aglet could develop enough of a following for those designers to produce real versions too. “I want to build what YouTube was for the last generation of media creators,” Mullins says. “I want to build the platform for the next generation of sneaker designers or fashion designers. I think it starts first in a game environment, and then it will leak into physical reality.”