“UA” stands for “Unauthorized Authentic”. UA products are very similar to retail N[ike]/J[ordan] Brand shoes but are never officially contracted with those companies to be made. UA shoes and all UA products are usually made in the same factories, with the same input materials, and the same workers that make the official retail pairs in most cases on the very same production line. They differ from replica products because they are of a much higher quality and most people cannot differ UA products from retail products. It is important to note that most UA products cannot be resold as authentic because they do not receive the final hidden markings for authentication from the brands.

In case you’re curious to learn more:

If you’re a sneaker-head, you’ve probably become accustomed to hearing various terms in relation to the authenticity of collectible sneakers. Starting with the obvious – “authentic”

– shoes which have passed through the authorized supply chain of the brand whose logo they depict.

What about the other terms, though? “Unauthorized Authentic” (UA), “fake”, “counterfeit”, “replica”, or even “knockoff”?

In this article, we attempt to clarify the meaning of these terms and explore the unexpected details involved in whether or not a certain branded item can be considered to be “authentic” or not. *Spoiler alert* - It’s a lot more complex than you may think.

IT'S NOT AS SIMPLE AS REAL OR FAKE ANYMORE

First, we’ll take a stab at defining what should be the easiest terms of all – “authentic”. In order for a pair of sneakers to be considered authentic, there are quite a few steps they need to pass through. Let’s go through them one-by-one:

1. They need to be an original design of the brand

   
   

   Firstly, they need to be a design which originates from the brand on the label. Now this one may seem mind-numbingly obvious but a staple of many low-grade knockoffs is the tendency to take the logo of a brand and stamp it on any model the sellers think will sell well.

   
   

   For example, take a look at these “Off-White” Yeezys. Now these may look perfectly fine to the untrailed eye, the quality even looks pretty decent. However, those who are

   acquainted with both brands involved here will know that there is no way such an official collaboration could have ever come to fruition. Even though Kanye and Virgil (R.I.P) were very close, “Yeezy” is a brand that has been under the umbrella of “the Stripes” (we will avoid using the names of big brands in this article) for a number of years, while “Off- White” has only ever been involved with “the Tick” when it comes to sneaker collaborations.

   
   

   

   
   

2. The design needs to have been commissioned for production by the brand itself

   
   

   Contrary to popular belief, the big brands responsible for the collectible hype sneakers we all know and love do not actually run their own factories.

   
   

   Trump’s trade war with China has meant that many American brands have been forced to try and move their production back to the States. Despite this, the attractively low costs of labour and materials in Asian countries means that these big brands still subcontract the manufacture of over 90% of their inventory to independently run factories in China, Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia. With Chinese factories producing the vast majority. Selecting the factory/ies to be granted a production contract for a certain model involves sharing official blueprints, moulds, and materials suppliers with a number of them. Sample batches are subsequently produced and evaluated, while negotiations on pricing are

   carried out. Finally, the brand will select one or a handful of factories to manufacture their official supply (depending on the number of units needed) and place an order with them. The remaining (not-selected) factories will be instructed to destroy the official blueprints and moulds per intellectual property (IP) law.

   
   

   

   
   

   Given the level of IP law enforcement in China, however, you can probably imagine that this almost never happens.

   
   

3. The units produced in the authorized factories need to pass through the brand’s quality control (QC) process

   
   

   When a factory receives an order for a specific number of shoes, it is common practice for them to produce significantly more than have been ordered. For example, if “the Tick” orders 30,000 pairs of Travis Scott AJ1 Reverse Mochas, the authorized factory may produce around 50,000 units instead. This is done with the purpose of having a tolerance for “bad eggs”.

   

   
   

   While the brand in question has become notoriously lax in terms of its QC standards, with certain newer models popping up in retail stores with glue marks and loose threads, they still reject quite a few pairs at the end of the production line. This means that authorized factories end up with a number of pairs they cannot sell officially ranging from the thousands to the 10s of thousands. As you can imagine, they hardly discard or recycle them for materials. No way, José.

   
   

4. The shoes which have passed the brands QC process, now need to go through their official wholesale and retail distribution process

Once the approved shoes leave the authorized factory, they begin their journey to the wholesale distributors, and subsequently reach the retailers, apps, and websites we’re somehow never able to cop from. After being swiftly bought up by bots and being back- doored to celebrities, as well as consignment shops at which senior executives of the brand often own shares, they hit the resale market. This is where the prices often triple or even grow to ten-times those at retail. The most well-known of these online marketplaces is StockX, which for a number of years reliably sold shoes they claimed to have been 100% authorized and authentic. In 2022 however, they sued by the biggest brand on their platform for allegedly selling unauthorized pairs of their shoes.

The whole StockX debacle just goes to show how subjective the entire debate on “authenticity” is to begin with. An online marketplace, which built their entire business and reputation on being able to authenticate rare and collectible sneakers – suddenly slammed for not exactly adhering to their advertised accuracy.

This begs the question – who is the ultimate authority on authenticity and does it really matter if this authority can suddenly be brought into question by the brand itself, casting doubt on years of supposed legitimate sales?

“THESE SHOES ARE ORIGINAL. IT’S JUST THE BRANDS THAT ARE FAKE”

The above quote was taken from a New York Times article from 2010, which took an in- depth look the unauthorized sneaker market. At one point, the author describes a raid of two warehouses in Brooklyn that year, which uncovered nearly 300,000 pairs of shoes branded with “the Tick”. The only way that the customs agents were able to establish them as non-authentic was because “the importation docs were not truthful”, according to an email from an immigration spokeswoman.

SO, WHAT EXACTLY ARE UA SNEAKERS THEN?

Based on what we’ve gone through above regarding defining authenticity, any single pair of shoes which does not meet all four criteria of authenticity cannot be considered as authorized or “authentic” per definition. Therefore, the product itself can be physically exactly the same, could have been made in the same factories with the same machinery, and be technically unauthorized because it did not pass through the brand’s QC or distribution chain.

These products are not to be mistaken with the what typically comes to mind when we think of replicas / knockoffs. They aren’t produced in a smokey, hidden-away Chinese sweatshop and they won’t fall apart after a few wears. These are basically the real deal with a cheat code and the conditions that they can’t be resold as authentic.

WHY CAN’T UAS BE RESOLD AS AUTHENTIC?

Firstly, it’s kind of a scummy thing to do (not that the brands don’t essentially do the same thing by hogging pairs on release and then reselling them after creating a false scarcity). Most importantly, however, after the shoes pass the QC of the brands, small markings are added in hidden places (often with UV ink), in order for them to be verifiable. Since the vast majority of UAs come factory-direct, this step has not been completed, and they therefore won’t be able to pass a thorough legit-check which checks for these hidden markings.

ARE THERE ANY ETHICAL OR LEGAL CONCERNS WHEN BUYING UA SNEAKERS?

It is not illegal to purchase or own unauthorized sneakers. Reselling them with the intention of deceiving someone into believing they are “authentic”, however, is illegal.

In terms of ethics, factories are actually paid more per unit for UA shoes than they are for their authentic counterparts. This is mainly due to the fact that authentic pairs are paid for in bulk, while UA shoes are sold in smaller quantities. Furthermore, factories are expected to charge a higher price on UA shoes due to the risk involved with selling them to begin with.

What often happens is that counterfeits/replicas/fakes start off life as factory samples: Nike, adidas, Puma etc...they do not make their own shoes in their own factories (this is slowly changing for some very high tech shoes though). They simply subcontract out manufacture to independently run factories in China, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia etc. What happens is they send design specs to a number of factories and ask them to make sample pairs, to check for quality etc. After some barter on pricing, they may select one, sometimes two factories to do a production run. The other factories that didn't get the order are supposed to destroy all existing samples and the tooling...most reputable ones do...But on occasion, some staff members take the blueprints and manufacturing process documentation, sometimes tooling and sell them to less reputable places. That is how the quality replicas often start life. There is a huge amount of shoemaking expertise in Asia and many of the Nike Air limited releases are based off well understood technology and materials - the Nike Air Force design has been around for over 30 years, thus it is easy for many to make excellent quality replicas. It is harder to properly copy higher technology designs like the adidas ultraboost, with the knit material uppers, Continental rubber outsole and of course the boost material, but this is changing rapidly. Oh, and sometimes 'replicas' are made by the authorised factories, but simply do not pass QC checks...and sometimes, what they do is when they get an order for maybe 25,000 pairs, they make 30,000 instead. 25,000 get sent through authorised supply chain channels...and the other 5,000 leave the factory via guys on motorbikes, private trucks etc. It's an interesting industry indeed...

I am officially against any form of copyright infringement...but being a realist, I can't deny the sheer scale of what I see around me. There was one article in the New York Times a number of years ago about the fake sneaker industry, there was one quote there by someone involved in the game that went along the lines of "These shoes are all real - its the brands that are fake". That has really stuck with me. I have done engagements in huge factories (over 3,000 people on one site) where adidas, Puma, Nike, Reebok and other branded sneakers were being made within 20m of each other. That kind of says it all: up until recently, all the big sneaker brands were more marketing than design engineering, though with the ultraboost all footwear brands have started to put in more effort into technical breakthroughs (Nike's React really comes to mind). To me, it was all just manufacturing, issues of supply chain and cost mimimization. But when I later got an assignment to increase the profitability of a retailer that did a lot of footwear turnover, I got a very real taste of the power of branding, the power of models like the Air Force 1 and the potential of collaborations to get sneakerheads and style leaders to start paying eye watering sums for slight variations to mass market shoes which involve changing a few colors/materials, minor panel alterations, maybe a bit of extra text or design details here and there etc etc...Now that was interesting to see. And given the money involved, its only natural that people would try their luck. As for the resale market, I simply don't know about the real vs fake ratios on GOAT or StockX. In

the end,, I guess it is similar to the art market: there are plenty of fakes out there, some of which have made it through the very capable checks of Sotheby's and Christies...and yet despite this, the world of art booms...I guess because there's always a market for having something no one else (or every few others) can have. I imagine sneakers will be the same.