How do I know if my sneakers are legit? Find out in 5 steps

How to tell if my sneakers are real or fake?

 

Unfortunately, this question comes to the minds of many buyers before and even after purchasing "original" sneakers from internationally recognized brands.

Therefore, brands such as Nike, Puma, Adidas, Reebok, etc. have become the focus of piracy problems, as there is currently a very large market for this type of sneakers, including a market for "clone" sneakers that boast of being "identical" to the originals and can be quite confusing for buyers, making it very difficult to tell if we are making the purchase of an authentic product or a fake one.

The first mistake many people make when trying to recognize original sneakers is to look at the label of the sneakers expecting to find a "made in USA" or "made in Germany".... However, this is very unlikely, as the vast majority of sneaker brands have migrated their production to Asian countries or even Latin America to reduce their costs. Therefore, let's make one thing clear:

The country of origin of the sneakers will not tell you if your sneakers are real or fake!

The models of each brand vary so much in their manufacturing materials as well as in their stitching and sometimes even in their box, therefore, also looking inside the sneaker expecting to see some special characteristic like "a particular stitch" is not going to ensure the authenticity of the footwear.

So at first glance, it is very difficult to tell if the sneakers are real or not without more reference information, and while there is no specific way that can guarantee the purchase of your original sneakers, then... how can you tell if your sneakers are real?.. well at SPORTLAND we give you the following recommendations to avoid falling victim to piracy.

1. Ask for a Receipt

One of the things that can give us a "signal" when making the purchase of your sneakers is knowing if the seller can issue you a receipt for them or not, since this way you will have a clearer idea if the necessary tariffs have been paid to legally import that product into your country, make sure that the data on the receipt matches the specific product of your purchase.

2. Check the tags

Another thing we can do to successfully purchase our original sneakers is to look for the product identifier code that we usually find on the label attached either on the tongue or on the sides of it.

As an example, let's take the Puma Nrgy Neko sneakers:

 

 

As we can see in the image, the label of these Puma sneakers has the code 381819-01 printed on it, with this code we can do a little search from the Google browser where we will write exactly the digits printed there, this way we will see a list of results where we can find different images of the sneakers like this one:

 

 

This way we can verify that the characteristics of the sneakers we are going to buy match the images that the search engine shows us, where we can learn authentic characteristics of the sneakers, from the type of sole, the color and the overall design.

3. Examine the box of your sneakers

Most fake sneakers do not come in their original box, instead, they come in generic boxes or even without a box, so we must make sure that the box where the sneakers come has exactly the same product code printed on the label, as well as the same size.

 

 

4. Know the product warranty

Another thing that will help us make that successful purchase of original shoes is to make sure that the place where we buy them offers some type of guarantee after a certain time of purchase. Generally, companies that sell these types of original shoe brands offer some type of customer satisfaction guarantee, and you can exchange or return the product without any problem.

 

 

Additionally, with this, we can have more time to verify the authenticity of the product and make a return if we are not convinced with the purchase.

5. Authenticity checker through applications

On the other hand, perhaps the safest way is to use applications that have been put on the market, such as the check check platform that you can download on your smartphone, send a couple of photos, and after waiting a few minutes, get a resolution on whether the shoes you bought are original or not. The downside to this is that these applications are generally not free, so you will have to spend an extra amount apart from the cost of your shoes to know their authenticity.