The Jordan 3 black cement is one of the most iconic shoes of all time and it recently retroed.

How did it go?

We're going to talk about it this time on Fire Footwear.

Welcome back to Fire Footwear, everybody.

As always, this is your host, Matt Fraits.

I hope that this finds you well.

I want to, as always, thank you for coming back to this podcast or if you're brand new, welcome to the Fire Footwear community.

I hope everybody who celebrates here in the United States and honestly, just everywhere, I hope you had a great Thanksgiving weekend, a Thanksgiving holiday, specifically those of you in the US That I know celebrated last Thursday, I know some of our Canadian friends celebrated a couple of months ago.

Wherever you are and however you spent this weekend, I just want to say out front that I'm thankful for you.

I'm thankful for the time that you give to this podcast and I'm just thankful to have the kind of platform that I do, the life that I have.

There's many things, including this podcast, that make my life great.

My wife, my son, my friends, a lot of things.

And I'm thankful for all of it.

So I hope that it treated you well and hopefully the end of this year will continue to treat you well and 2025 will again continue to treat you the best that it can.

But we're here to talk about the Black Cement 3.

Now, this isn't something that I was actually going to talk about quite this way.

As you know, I'm a big fan of cultivating history around here.

I do think that it's important to talk about shoes like the Black Cement 3 in a way that remembers where we came from.

The Black Cement 3 obviously debuted in 1988, and it is a shoe in many, many ways that really saved Jordan brand at the time and really got it to where we are today.

And the reason being is because the Jordan 2, while we look at it a lot differently Today, the Jordan 2 was a shoe that nearly lost Nike Michael Jordan.

The Jordan one was great.

Michael Jordan got hurt.

The Jordan two tried to basically get into exclusivity.

It tried to get into luxury goods.

And it just didn't work at the time for a basketball shoe.

Fast forward to today and it probably does work.

Back then it didn't.

And so Nike had to take a real risk in order to get Michael Jordan to be convinced to stay with the company.

It was difficult enough to get Michael Jordan to sign with them in the first place.

Now they had to keep him after a disappointing release.

So if you think about it they really had to find something to get him there.

And they took a chance on a guy who had hit a home run in 1986 with the Air Max 1.

And that was Tinker Hatfield.

Tinker Hatfield was given the keys to the kingdom, the keys to this Ferrari.

And they said, you are going to save this brand.

And Tinker Hatfield, the story goes, basically went to Michael Jordan and said, what do you want in a shoe?

And what came out of all of that was the Air Jordan 3.

And more specifically the Black Cement 3, which is the one that I think everybody thinks of when they think of the debut of the Air Jordan 3.

Obviously there are other OG colorways.

The White Cement 3 is another iconic one.

We all know the history here.

And that's what I originally wanted to talk about.

I wanted to talk about the fact that the elephant print overlays and all of that stuff, that aesthetic had never been seen before.

And that is really what makes that shoe iconic and what makes it one of the most, or at least probably the highest selling Jordan ever.

And you have the one, the three, the four, those are probably some of the most popular.

Let's throw the 11 in there too.

And so every so often, what, five or six years or so, Jordan brand goes back to the vault and they pull out some of these OG color of these iconic shoes that they know are going to sell very, very well.

It happened in 2018, I think it happened in 2012.

So for the Black Cement 3, it seems to be about every six years or so that we get a true proper retro of the Jordan 3 black cement.

And so sneaker culture has been very excited about this for a while.

There's been a lot of buzz and the release came about.

Now the release came about with a shock drop, which is always a good thing, especially in today's world when we know about the shock drops.

Now, I know that I've probably talked about that and said, well, how can you call it a shock drop if we know about it?

And at this point, I've just kind of come to grips with reality that social media is going to ruin a lot of these things that beforehand we would have never known about.

So the shock drop comes and it gives people an opportunity to cop a shoe that they really want.

Many people out there probably own at least one retro of the Black Cement 3, if not more.

If you've been in the game long enough, you may or may not have every iteration of it, but you at least have the 2018 pair.

I did have the 2018 pair.

And before we get into everything that I saw in the commentary and reviews of the shoe that I saw, I had the 2018 pair.

And while I appreciate the shoe for what it is, I appreciate it for where it is in history.

Probably one of my hottest takes is I don't think that the black cement Jordan 3 is one of the best shoes of all time.

I know many people feel that way.

I know a lot of people are probably going to gasp, maybe even clutch their pearls, hearing me say something like that.

But that's the thing about sneakers, right?

Is we don't always have to like the same thing.

That's something I've talked about a lot on this show over the course of this year, is that you should like what you like.

And if you don't like a shoe or you don't want to pay money for a shoe, just don't go after it.

Trust me, plenty of other sneaker people are going to go after it.

So the Black Cement three drops is a shock drop.

People start getting their pairs and you start hearing some rumblings, some whispers about the fact that this release was not good quality.

One of the things Jordan Brand seemed to really hone in on in this release, and it's something that I think that they've tried to hone in on a lot more over the last couple of years, especially after watching people like Chris from Wear Testers talk about the fact that they can't get the shape right as it relates to the og.

And you'd think to yourself, I wonder why that is.

So Nike and Jordan Brand have gone back to the drawing board to try to make sure that the shape is as close to the OG as possible.

And then the big release happened.

People were able to cop pairs.

Obviously, some pairs made it to the outlets, but there's a little bit of a difference between being in an outlet these days and being at outlet prices.

To me, the Nike outlet really isn't an outlet anymore.

It's just a way for Nike to put more merchandise in front of us and make us think sometimes that we're getting a deal, when in reality we're paying retail, if not very, very close to retail.

And now people are getting their pairs en masse.

So you're seeing a lot of people on social media, you're seeing a ton of people on YouTube reviewing this shoe and across the board.

The through line that I have seen is that quality is very, very down on all of these pairs.

While the shape is amazing and a lot closer to the og, which is great for the historians out there.

When it comes to the actual quality, the actual execution of the shoe, many, many people are very disappointed in the pairs that they got.

And we saw this before another iconic shoe, the Air Max 90 Bacon, which is one of my favorite colorways of all time.

That shoe was retroed kind of in 2021.

And the quality of that was very, very bad across the board.

And at the time, I remember, I think I even had this podcast, I remember talking about the fact that listening to a lot of people talk about that shoe and complain about the things that they saw on that shoe, it very much was reminiscent of the way that other kinds of sneakerheads talk.

And that's really where I want to get into kind of the meat of what I want to talk about here.

A lot of the complaints that I have seen have talked about quality of materials, and they've talked about the inconsistency in the quality across the board.

And I think that that's a fair criticism.

I think that if you're talking about the kind of money that we're paying, and this release actually shines a very, very bright light on the fact, and it's something we've talked about a lot here and you hear in other places is that these sneaker brands are asking more and more of us.

And not just in the fact that they're giving us more shoes to choose from.

They're asking us to pay more and more money every single time.

Even within a given year, one silhouette like the Jordan 3 could go up $10.

And I think what they have assumed is that we are so embedded in this culture that we are so into sneakers that we're just going to pay it blindly.

And the numbers are not proving that.

The numbers are showing that Nike has had to pivot in a lot of ways.

They've changed CEOs for that mere fact that they have lost, what, billions of dollars because sneakers have taken a downturn.

Now, Nike is obviously an athletics wear brand, but at the end of the day, when we're talking about sneakers, a lot of people love sneakers today.

And so when you go back into the vault and when you go back and take a piece of history like the Jordan 3 black cement, in my opinion, the details matter.

And you have to make sure that you get the details right.

And when we talk about bad materials, when we talk about inconsistent elephant print, and when we hear a lot about other quality control issues that have come out of the Nike warehouse, it begs the question of this global brand, this iconic brand, not just Nike, but Jordan Brand.

Also, how can they not get their quality consistent?

That's something that I don't really understand.

Now, this other group of sneakerheads that I'm talking about are people that really or solely live in the fake sneaker space or the replica space.

I've been very open about the fact that I do think that it's important for me to know what's going on there.

But I remember one of the turning points for me when I was embedded in that was looking at all the comments on Reddit about shoes that people posted and they wanted a quality check of the shoes that they were going to get.

Now, a lot of people who maybe don't know this, what happens in the replica market is you have some type of a supplier, whether it's a middleman or whether it's directly from a factory or directly from a seller who can get it at a lot cheaper of a price.

You place an order and before that order gets to you, you are shown pictures of the shoes that you're actually going to get.

And you'd think to yourself, well, how do you know that you're going to get those?

Well, a lot of that market actually self polices itself.

So if you're going to bait and switch people, word is going to get out very quickly.

So for the most part, any seller that's worth a damn is going to show you the actual shoes that you're going to get.

And one of the reasons that this happens is because it allows the customer, somebody like me, to look at the quality of this shoe, at least as it relates to stitching and the way that things are embroidered and just making sure that things are even.

I remember thinking to myself, I just want to make sure that the shoe that I'm getting is as close to retail as possible, but also doesn't look like something that I actually made in my attic.

That was kind of my standard.

But I noticed that a lot of people in that market were doing what I thought was nitpicking about these shoes.

They'd be like this little stitches off here.

This midsole seems like it's a little bit darker than it should be.

And it got to the point where the minutia of the things that people were pointing out were so ridiculous that it made American sneakerheads seem so picky and just seem so kind of bougie compared to a lot of the international people that were buying there.

And the reason I bring this up is because I realized something.

Listening to people talk about the black cement release, listening to people talk about the quality issues with it, the inconsistency with it.

I realized that we're all kind of the same.

And I've realized that no matter what market you traffic in, what you really want at the end of the day is that whatever brand it is that you're buying from, whether it's from Nike and Jordan brand, or whether it's from some middleman in China, you want to make sure that your hard earned money is going to translate into the best quality product that you can have.

And today, whether we like it or not, sneakers do represent clout for a lot of people.

That's no shade on anybody who feels better because they have shoes that other people don't.

But you also, if that's something that you do, you want to make sure that the shoes that you have in your collection are as good as they can be.

Because when you are showing them off to other people, you never want somebody to look at them and say, man, this shit is whack.

And that's the truth.

Whether you're buying retail, whether you're buying fakes, that's what you want at the end of the day.

And one thing that I've noticed that these fake replica sellers, whatever you want to call them, actually strive for, for the most part, is making sure that the quality is high because they know that their business could suffer because of word of mouth.

The difference here is that Nike and Jordan brand, even though it seems like they're striving for that consistency, the execution of it from release to release doesn't happen.

And that is a problem.

And it's a problem because they don't think that we actually care about that in a way that is going to put any type of a dent into their bottom line.

And that's kind of what I want to talk about even more here is that we have an opportunity sometimes as sneaker heads, to really make a difference in this market.

But I think that we have been conditioned to not sit things out because we feel like we're going to miss out and we feel like we're not going to have something that maybe other people are going to have.

But The Black Cement 3 should tell you something.

It should tell you that we should ask for more from these brands.

We should not just assume that they're going to get it right and we should not just assume that, well, this is the only time I'm going to have to get it, so I need to make sure I spend my money on it.

If it's not worth your Money, no matter where you're getting the shoe from, you shouldn't buy it.

And we as consumers should make sure that that message gets sent loud and clear to Nike, to Jordan brand, to Adidas.

It doesn't matter what the brand is.

We should be telling them with our words and more importantly, with our wallet that we want better and the Jordan 3 black cement deserved better.

Just because it's not a shoe that I like and just because I don't have this particular iteration of it doesn't mean that I can't go to real sneaker heads.

The people that I called the boots on the ground and get their real feedback, their honest feedback.

That's something I've talked about in the show earlier this year, too, is the fact that Nike and Jordan brand, they really need to get people like us in the lab, in these meeting rooms, get real feedback.

And they would learn that the Jordan 3 black cement is so sacred in this space that they can't mess it up.

And they've messed it up big time.

And we as the consumer, we should be telling them loud and clear that we are not going to stand for this.

And with that, let's get to the release of the week.

Release of the week, where I like to highlight a shoe that has caught my eye.

It's not always hype.

It's just something that I want you to know about.

So we talked about the Black Cement 3 being iconic and something that we remember today.

Well, something else that was iconic were the Seattle Supersonics and if you recall, in the 90s, Sean Kemp, Gary Payton, there were some really good Supersonics teams and teams that could have won the NBA Finals if not for Michael Jordan existing.

So on December 7th, Nike SB Dunk Low Sonex Colorway.

This is an absolutely fire colorway of the Nike SB Low, especially for people like myself who remember those teams and just it's something that is nostalgic to me.

It makes me feel a certain way and brings me back to those times.

And I think if you're of a certain age in sneaker culture, you have those memories.

So December 7th is your time.

It's probably going to be 120, $130 on the sneakers app.

It's going to be tough to get.

But you know what?

You should go out and get it because the Supersonics were fire.

These shoes are fire.

This gum sole, amazing execution.

I can't wait to try out for it.

How do you feel about the Black Cement 3 in 2024?

And how do you feel about the idea that we should be more vocal to these companies about the lack of quality and consistency with their releases, let me know.

Hit me up on Instagram.

Irefootwearpod is the handle.

Of course you can call the Fire Footwear Hotline, area code 202-643-9170 is the number to give me a story, give me an opinion.

Whatever it is, I'd love to play it on a future episode.

YouTube Fire Footwear Sneakers Talk with Matt Frates I'm going to be putting up some reviews pretty soon and hopefully we can get back to some consistent content both in audio and in video.

I appreciate everybody's time.

I hope this finds everybody well and safe as I always do and I'll talk to you next time.

This is Fire Footwear.

The opinions and viewpoints expressed on Fire Footwear are those of Matt Frates and his guest and not necessarily those of the Maddie Ice Media Network.

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