Lakewood – Ken Toledo is the godfather of soles.
Step inside his modest house tucked behind West Colfax Avenue, make a left at the living room and behold a sight you’re unlikely to ever see again.
Shoes. Lots and lots of shoes.
They hang from plastic racks. They’re stacked in boxes atop rows and rows of industrial shelving. Some are stored in red velvet bags.
In all, there are 550 pairs of them – Adidas with Goodyear-like tread; silver Pumas that resemble an astronaut’s boots; and camouflage-toed Nikes for those times when – when?
Add to those the 350 pairs that belong to his wife, Nicole, and you’ve got a collection that would warm Imelda Marcos’ heart.
“I don’t think the relationship would work if my wife didn’t have a thing for shoes, too,” said 30-year-old Toledo, a manager at a metro-area shoe store.
The Pittsburgh native pulls a pair of brown-and-orange Nike Dunks from a shelf, laces dangling from the sides of the size-10 1/2 shoes.
“These really aren’t my favorites,” he says. “Strange that I’d say that since I have 15 pairs.”
To be sure, Toledo says, he’s not a “sneakerhead” – shorthand for a shoe fanatic who collects every style and brand imaginable, saves original boxes and plans to sell them for hundreds of dollars in profit on the Internet.
No, Toledo is a sneaker connoisseur. A man of discriminating taste. A man who has green- and-yellow foldable foam shoes.
“I have no idea why he does this,” Flor Toledo says of her son, who has traveled to London and Paris and has a trip to Japan planned next year in search of the perfect shoe. “I visited him in the spring, and I went to the room with all those shoes and said, ‘Oh, my God, Kenny, what are you doing?”‘
Athletic shoes are a $16 billion industry, up nearly $2 billion since 1999, propelled in part by limited-edition sneakers that celebrate everything from colleges to rap artists to the New York street pigeon (cement-gray-and-white Nikes with a pigeon on the heel).
Pairs of vintage sneakers – any shoe older than 10 years old generally is considered vintage – usually fetch the highest prices. A 20-year-old pair of metallic-blue-and-white Air Jordan I high-tops was selling recently for $5,000 on the website instyleshoes.com, and several other old-time Nike styles are constantly offered on eBay for hundreds of dollars.
“Runners have been collecting shoes for decades, but it picked up after (Michael) Jordan in the 1980s, when there were people who were really influenced by what he wore,” says Bryan LaRoche, 27, who has collected more than 500 pairs of shoes, half of which are stored in his Denver home. “More athletes started getting their own styles, more people started collecting them, and that turned into what you’re seeing today.”
Like most shoe fanatics, Toledo began his collection much smaller and cheaper. As a middle school student in Pennsylvania, he bought his first $100 pair of Nike Air Max with money he made delivering newspapers. He graduated to a several-pair- a-year habit while studying humanities at the University of Pittsburgh.
Today, he owns a pair of the ultra-expensive Jordans and spends thousands of dollars on nearly 100 pairs of shoes each year, some of which he resells or gives to friends.
While 100 pairs are in “heavy rotation,” the other 450 are on “ice,” meaning he’s worn them only once or twice – ever. Several pairs still have the original tissue paper stuffed into the toes.
He changes his sneakers at least four times a day, placing a cedar shoe tree inside each pair afterward to prevent any traces of odor. The rest are meticulously cleaned, lest a drop of rain, a dollop of snow or a doggy land mine sully its facade.
Toledo’s in-laws call the couple the “Shoe-ledos.” Friends laugh when they see the collection.
No matter, Nicole Toledo says.
“How many men can you take shoe shopping?” the 30-year-old says. “It’s great. I’m in the women’s section, and he takes the men’s.”
On a recent weekday, the two shopped shoe store after shoe store before finally spying a pair of $80 limited-edition Adidas.
“We were so excited,” Nicole Toledo says. “I had to have them.”
They bought four pairs.
Staff writer Robert Sanchez can be reached at 303-820-1282 or at rsanchez@denverpost.com.
Denver Post researcher Barbara Hudson contributed to this report.
