Prices of Yeezy Boost 350 in Kuwait vs World

What is so special about those shoes?

It’s a simple supply and demand equation. The supplier will charge whatever price you are willing to pay. There is no logical reason for him to charge you 66 KD if you are willing to pay 115. Why forgo 49 Bucks, especially when there is no competition?

Harvey Nichols is not a charity helping poor sneaker heads. They’re in it for the money, so the concept of greed is irrelevant. They raise the markup on some products to offset lowering it on others. So, if you’re dying to get a “limited supply” product quickly to show it off to your friends, be prepared to fork a premium.

Hey Mark,

This comment is a bit late so it might not be picked up by the people wondering why stuff in Kuwait is priced so expensively. Let’s just say I have a lot of visibility on pricing for retail brands 

The price isn’t high because of an Arab Tax or because they think they can get away with it. The cost of getting these items over here really is a LOT more than it is shipping to nearby cities in the US.

Keep in mind:

For a lot of brands, this stuff is made cheaply in Asia. Let’s just use China as an example

The finished product is boxed and shipped to wherever the head brand is, say New York. They do QA and final boxing and whatever. This process already takes a lot of time and money and the head brand is taking a big risk getting to this point, remember this product can always perform poorly in the end and sink a lot of that investment.

It needs to be shipped AGAIN to the Middle East from New York. First of all, the brand wants to make money on this, so they charge a higher fee than what they paid to China because they are the middleman and can afford to. So they tack a cost on when they sell it to you, and then you pay MORE for shipping it once again. This usually means it goes by boat from New York to Dubai, then to Kuwait. Yes it would’ve been cheaper to go straight to Kuwait but many suppliers will intentionally not allow this. This is a process that takes many months, the whole thing can easily, easily take 6 months by the time you get it in store, this is why so much planning is done so far in advance for retail brands.

Now you get some products where you don’t have 6 months – for these sneakers if you are late by a month nobody will buy them anymore. So you can skip a large chunk of the process and pay to fly them over. As you can imagine, buying an express shipment of shoes is not cheap. So, on top of all the costs you had before, you have to tack on yet another fee for the express delivery.

So it lands in Kuwait. Haha you thought it was done? I see you’ve never dealt with Kuwaiti Customs. They can be a nightmare for getting in a single phone, now imagine what they do with a shipping container full of shoes someone told them cost hundreds of dollars each. Throw in delays from all sides for the payment processing to and from like 10 different parties.

Harvey Nichols has probably spent $190 getting it here. If they sold it for $200 they would literally be losing money (there are costs associated with selling, and they have to pay Royalties to Harvey Nichols, and in some cases have to pay once again to Nike). Most clothing brands worldwide have a rule of thumb that they mark things up to about double the price of what they cost when they sell them. So if you see a polo shirt in the US for $50, good rule of thumb is it cost polo $25. See it in Kuwait for $100? That’s because it cost the Kuwait Polo franchise $50 to get it here. Remember that a lot of pieces typically do not sell through and you have to cover their costs as well, before they go on 50% sale and lose money on each piece.

Kuwait is a tiny market so it’s usually not cheap to ship things here without prior arrangements. The only reason they bother is because people actually do pay for the ridiculous cost of getting it here, the alternative to paying stupid amounts is for stuff to not come here at all. Dubai is probably getting them cheaply because they have a direct link to the supplier instead of going through a workaround. As a good example: Remember how much a PS4 cost when it was released? And then how it dove to 120KD when Sony released it themselves? The Xbox and PS4 were supposed to be priced identically but because of the supplier becoming directly involved they were able to cut out the middleman and offer the fair price.