How to Effectively Downsize Your Sneaker Collection

The Floor Is Lava

This is a preliminary step, used to visually identify if shoes need to go. Assuming you already have some dedicated storage for your collection, envisage that area as the physical constraint for your haul. As soon as shoeboxes creep out of bounds, and find themselves in unauthorised areas – like pantry shelves or the floor – it’s time to rethink your priorities. Play the childhood game ‘The Floor Is Lava’ and get those kicks off the ground!

If you can’t fit all of your pairs into the allocated space, it’s time to get ruthless.

The KonMari Method

Organisation consultant, Marie Kondo, took the world by storm when she graced Netflix streamers’ screens in January 2019 with her eponymous show Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. Known for her straightforward approach to de-cluttering, Kondo’s method involves grouping items by category, then asking ourselves the vital question: ‘Does this spark joy?’ 

If yes, keep the shoes. If no, it’s time to move them on. This is the simplest way to divide your sneaker collection into two obvious baskets. However, sentimentality, hording mindsets, and pure laziness can complicate the KonMari Method. Take the next steps to filter down your choices.

Excel Spreadsheets

If you’re a good sneakerhead, and store your shoes in their original boxes, pat yourself on the back. However, there is a downside to your fastidiousness: it’s extremely easy to forget what’s inside each box, because most of them are made from opaque cardboard.

To work around this, you need to log what shoes you actually own. Open a new Excel spreadsheet and start three columns: brand, model, and colourway or style code. Sort the brand column by A to Z, and it should group your collection alphabetically by brand.

The next step is to use the traffic light system. Highlight cells in green if the shoes spark joy. Red if they do not spark joy. And yellow for shoes that occasionally spark joy. For these pesky yellow cells, use ‘The Window’…

The Window (Warning: Math Involved!)

This refers to the last time the sneakers in question were worn. Years of experience and experimentation have allowed us to devise a formula to determine the duration of The Window:

Let W be an unknown value representing The Window’s duration in days.

Let N be equal to the number of pairs of sneakers in a collection.

W = N

Therefore, The Window is open for the amount of days equal to the number of sneakers owned in a collection.

Which means, to determine whether a pair of sneakers is to be kept, we refer to the formula. If the sneakers have been worn within The Window, then they are kept. If the duration exceeds The Window, bye bye sneakers. One important condition of The Window is it applies to each sneaker independently, so it resets each time they’re worn.

For example, if someone owns 10 pairs of sneakers, and wears a particular pair on January 1, they have until January 11 to wear them again before the Window is closed. But, if they wear the shoes again on January 5, they have until January 15. This methodology is quite manageable with smaller sneaker collections, but if someone has hundreds of shoes, it becomes easy to lose track. If all else fails…