The Resale Rockstars Selling Jeans for $20,000

NEW YORK — Offset, Tyga, Drake, Playboi Carti, Central Cee and Shai-Gilgeous Alexander have all been spotted slipping into 151 Spring Street for a retail fix that hits harder than the big-brand luxury boutiques that crowd Soho.

Upstairs away from prying eyes, Vincent Ferraro and Dave Singh, the controversial fashion resellers known as 4G, run an appointment-only space where big-time rappers, basketball players and other moneyed menswear aficionados, seeking privacy and a cred factor most retailers can’t match, come to hang out and drop serious cash for ultra-rare Chrome Hearts jeans ($19,500), Enfants Riches Déprimés T-shirts ($1200), and Raf Simons hoodies ($8800).

“These guys could fucking chill here with no paparazzi or cameras in their face,” says Ferraro, the business’ frontman. “They can’t do that anywhere else.”

4G — which also hosts private, tightly curated pop-up shopping events, selling in cities like Paris and Miami (where they recently sold $250,000 worth of goods in just two days out of two Rimowa suitcases) — has grown quickly in recent years but remains relatively small.

According to Singh, who oversees business operations, the company has doubled its revenue each year since 2020 and is on track to generate $12 million in 2025, aided by growing sales of womenswear and in-house label Go Fuck Yourself, which offers vintage items silkscreened with the 4G logo as well as streetwear staples like the bandana Playboi Carti wore courtside at a Hawks vs Trail Blazers game last month.

But in today’s “boom boom” era, when social media is awash in 80s-style excess, a piece from 4G has become a key fashion flex for a highly visible crowd who post pics of themselves on Instagram carrying the reseller’s logo-stamped green shopping bags — in part because an invitation to shop with Ferraro and Singh is as exclusive as the items on offer.

Ferraro and Singh aren’t the first to bring a curatorial eye and celebrity following to the fashion resale space. Justin Reed, who runs a celebrity-favourite showroom in Los Angeles, and Luke Fracher of Luke’s are part of a wave that turned reselling from side hustle to high-end business as the category grew from flipping Air Jordans to trading in luxury goods.

But 4G has become particularly famous — some would say infamous — for cultivating a highly influential crowd willing to pay stratospheric prices for a piece of the action.

It hasn’t hurt that Ferraro and Singh look a lot like their rockstar clients — heavily tattooed, iced-out in Alex Moss jewels, and dressed in baggy Chrome Hearts fits — nor that their Spring Street space feels like a clubhouse where they entertain and pose for pics with key clients, forging the kind of high-touch customer relationships that are rare in traditional retail.

To be sure, the duo are savvy marketers and no stranger to a social media stunt. In 2023, Ferraro threw a pair of $10,000 Chrome Hearts jeans off the balcony of their showroom and into a crowd of awaiting fans.

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“The thing that’s so special about 4G is that they’re not just selling clothes — they’re selling a lifestyle,” says Arun Gupta, founder of resale site Grailed, where Ferraro and Singh became power resellers and still drive significant revenue. The platform is also a useful marketing tool. “We’ll have a pair of jeans listed for $80,000 on Grailed, which gets a lot of attention and also brings customers to our stores,” explains Singh.

4G has plenty of haters on Reddit, who claim Ferraro and Singh are trustafarians. But their rise to reseller fame is, in fact, a tale of how lower middle-class kids from New York’s outer boroughs became Manhattan insiders through grit, hustle and gumption.

Ferraro, then a club promoter, first dipped his toes into the resale business in 2011 with an eBay account because he needed money to “live that New York life,” he says. “It was the only way to get money for clothes.” His first listing was a pair of Gucci gloves that sold for $200.

He discovered he had a knack for finding rare items, then began to scale his side hustle by buying items to resell from the Woodbury Commons outlet. The following year he met Singh, when the two found themselves modelling for a mutual friend’s now-defunct jewellery brand.

In 2016, Ferraro and Singh, now a duo, started selling on Grailed, where they became one of the platform’s top power resellers. In 2019, they scraped together about $120,000 to open their first physical space and invest in inventory. The following year, when Covid hit, 4G, like many resellers, benefitted from the store closures and stimulus checks that reshaped retail.

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Sourcing is the lifeblood of resale and Ferraro, who is in charge of buying, has an eye for special pieces, ballsy sourcing skills (he’s even bought clothes right off someone’s back at a club) and an appetite for risk.

“He stretched himself to get those things,” explains Gupta. “He didn’t grow in an incremental, safe, by-the-books way, because he’s not a safe, by-the-books kind of guy. He went balls to the wall.”

Singh says their secret is not only selling to stars but sourcing from celebrities, who trust them to resell their clothes. “These relationships have been built over 10 to 15 years,” adds Ferraro.

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Part of the promise for stars and other high-spenders is that, with 4G, you’re not only buying a piece with high clout factor, but that you can flip it when you’re done with it.

“The big problem with primary retail is the same as with used cars,” says Gupta. “As soon as you wear that leather jacket out of the store, you probably lose 50 percent of its value. But not when you buy from 4G — you don’t lose anything.”

“With our clothes, even though the price is 5k, over the years it can be worth 30,000,” says Singh. “They are liquid assets.”