Kicks Kingdom: Father and son's growing empire caters to sneaker connoisseurs

Air Jordan, Yeezy, Airmax and Uptempo shoes are some of the sneakers that line the walls at Duke City Heat’s Cottonwood location.

Fifteen-year-old Sonny Roberts owns and runs the store with his father, David Roberts. The pair buy, sell and trade sneakers, with price tags from $200 to $25,000. The store also carries designer street clothing brands.

Sneaker collecting has grown in popularity over the last 20 years, with nostalgia for ‘80s and ‘90s shoes strong among millennials. A report from market research group YouGov found that the number of people willing to spend more than $100 on sneakers had grown by 18% in just the last year. The sneaker resale market even has its own exchange, StockX, and sneaker exchange groups can be found all over the world.

“I feel like I owe it to New Mexico and I owe it to myself and I owe it to my father to push for the biggest shoe store in the world,” Sonny Roberts said. “At the end of the day, there can only be one biggest and one best and that’s my goal. I’m trying to think long term.”

Roberts is well on his way to a sneaker empire, with stores opening in Clovis and Santa Fe later this year. Roberts is in 10th grade and attends school online, so that he can focus on running the business. Building a growing shoe empire, Roberts has learned to haggle, how to negotiate and the importance of sticking to his word.

What Roberts enjoys most about the work is supplying people with something they can express themselves with.

“A lot of people, when they see our sneakers, it brings them back to when they had them in 1991,” Roberts said.

The teenager can rattle off shoe brands and predict which sneakers will be hot in a few years (“The main thing to look out for is OG colorways, that’s original colorways that Jordan wore. Anything that you’ve seen Jordan wear, if they rerelease that shoe, they’ll sell.”) He can evaluate a used shoe’s quality by the creases, the designer and through careful research and a lifetime of sneaker knowledge, earned trading shoes in Albuquerque.

Part of a shoe’s appeal can be who worked with the designer. Collaborations with athletes and rappers can increase hype around a release and the shoe’s resale value. Rarity is the most important quality for a shoe collector, Roberts said.

Axios reported in February that sneaker resale prices were on the decline, a sign that the market for re-sold sneakers might be normalizing after especially high resale prices in 2020 and 2021, but sneaker sales and re-sales are still big business. Statista estimates that the global sneaker market is worth over $70 billion this year and predicts it will continue to increase in value. The Washington Post reported that a Yeezy drop in June brought in more than $440 million, even after Adidas ended its collaboration with Kanye West in 2022.

Although the popularity of different shoes may ebb and flow, Roberts’ love for sneakers has been consistent. He got started in the sneaker game through his dad.

“All his buddies and all his close friends were what we’d call collectors or sneakerheads. It’s like a sneaker connoisseur,” Roberts said. “So just being around my father and just hanging around the sneaker culture, automatically I was into it. My dad had me a collection before I was even born.”

The father and son started selling sneakers out of a car trunk. They opened the first Duke City Heat storefront in Nob Hill — that store carried around 600 pairs of shoes. The son and father have grown their inventory to 10 times that size.

Roberts says there is huge demand for sneakers in New Mexico, and Duke City Heat has been able to expand quickly in four years because it’s a very underserved market.

“I feel like once we came along with Duke City Heat, we got to bring the sneakerhead out of people and a lot of people weren’t able to show their sneakerhead because a lot of sneakers weren’t available to everyone,” Roberts said. “Now a lot of people are able to come to Duke City Heat, get the sneakers they were looking for and a lot more sneakerheads have been showing out.”

The family didn’t come from wealth, said David Roberts, but Sonny has always wanted to own a business, and took initiative to make the dream real.

“He’s not Benjamin Kickz,” said David Roberts. (Benjamin Kickz was a teenage sneaker mogul who became well-known for selling sneakers to celebrities like DJ Khaled.) “He’s not a dude who asked his parents for a loan. He’s not a kid that had money growing up. His mom sold cellphones and I worked in restaurants. The story is not: this kid and his dad that are opening up shoe stores everywhere. That’s actually not the story.

“The story is that we worked our way up. We grinded out of the trunk of our car from nothing ... The story is about anybody can do it. The story is if you find something you’re passionate about, you can do it too.”