While it would be reasonable to assume that Kanye West’s full-throated support of Donald Trump on Twitter would be hurting his brand, according to a recent GQ piece, it’s having the opposite effect.
“What we might have expected to happen… didn’t,” writes Cam Wolf. “Instead, interest in the Yeezy brand has actually increased on popular resale platforms.”
“StockX, the resale platform that treats shoes and apparel like stocks, says that search traffic for Yeezy has actually gone up… by a whole 25 percent,” and “at the reselling site Grailed, offers on Yeezys were up 15 percent and interest expressed in the shoes — measured by likes — was up 40 percent Wednesday and Thursday.”
Interestingly, the story also notes that “this spike comes at a time when interest in the brand was tumbling… Average sale prices [were] down roughly 30 percent from the beginning of 2017.” But, “when Kanye went alt-lite, that changed.”
So whether his barrage of Trump-friendly tweets were a meltdown (he claimed that both he and Trump had “dragon energy,” which sounds super stable), a publicity stunt, or genuine, the controversy he created is helping him. As well as completely dominating the Twitter-verse: “Twitter released stats last week showing Kanye had been tweeted about 4.2 million times and was up half a million followers since his return to the platform.”
It’s been a hell of year, folks. And we’re not even halfway through it yet.
You can read more about it at GQ.
