Streetwear is recently a big part of the culture in media. We all know brands like Supreme or Yeezy and have some friends that buy super expensive sneakers. However how fashion industry can be connected to technology or even programming?
The answer is pretty easy. Limited clothes or sneakers have their premiere data and hour on a website. From that time you can buy them online. The problem is even if you can afford them there are plenty of people that are willing to buy them too. Most often in seconds or a minute everything is sold out. Here comes a bot.
What is a bot?
Bot is a program or even small software that is made to behave as a human. It can create accounts, log and buy what we want. It smartly passes through all 
securities like CAPTCHA. The best part is that it works in seconds and is much faster and accurate than any person. What is more he can create numerous accounts and buy many more limited products than people can manually. Sometimes websites with really good anti-bot systems try to prevent from fake customers. Then bot is only available to add some products to your “shopping card” and you must finish your purchase on your own. Even then it enables to buy some really rare clothing.
From the streetwear brands perspective
Big brands with really hyped sneakers or other pieces of clothing have big problem with sneaker bots. Bots often lead to website crashes or errors. Most important they create inequality among customers. Very often sneakerheads and true customers can’t buy their “grails”, because of bots. Now when people realized that in resell market it is easy to make money they completely ignore any other aspect. In result old fans of brands are hurt and customers focused on reselling clothes are getting rich. This leads to a big discussion and many people are upset about it, because whole streetwear culture suffers.
How it works in practice?
Getting a bot is relatively easy. There are numerous sites like Aiobot where you just purchase your bot online legally. Then you need to describe what brand and specific items you want to purchase. You also specify the date of a release. When you finish completing all details like your address and card number, bot will be ready to work. It will wait to estimated date and buy what you described.
References:
https://www.aiobot.com
https://smartproxy.com/blog/what-is-a-sneaker-bot
https://www.distilnetworks.com/glossary/term/sneaker-bot/
https://www.netacea.com/blog/what-are-sneaker-bots
Pretty useful bots actually, I don’t know exactly, how they operate in the reselling industry, but I know, that some similar bots are already capturing eBay. By the word “capturing” I mean, that more and more people using special software, that allows them to break the bid at the auction one second before the end of bidding. It’s pretty unfair, but it works and really helps to get something for a reasonable price.