There's a Savage Sneaker Head in all of us

On his recent trip to DC, D Rod sat down with Dom Adams, the GM of Major, a SAVAGE sneaker boutique in Georgetown to talk about everything from their Savage store opening in the middle of the night to what kicks celebrities like LeBron James are picking up at their store. If you’re a sneaker head or just like a good pair of dunks, this shit will blow your mind.

Major

1426 Wisconsin Ave NW

Washington, DC 20007

MDS: Tell me about the store opening

Dom: Before we opened there was a little sticker on the outside of the door and there was paper up… so the kids had decided that they were going to come in the morning that the store was gonna be open… It all started on the forums, The Freshness… Nike Top, etc... The kids pretty much figured out that the next day the store was going to be completed. So they were waiting outside... about half a block long there was a line of kids. So when the paper got torn off the window there was literally a crowd already standing outside. This was like 12:30 or damn near 1 in the morning and the kids all came in.

MDS: Y’all are in the heart of the Georgetown district, it’s a cool spot but it’s a predominately white upper middle class neighborhood. There is a lot of suits and corpos here, how do you get your clientele?
Dom: For us, we are unique in a way that Georgetown’s legendary shopping resides on M Street. We are on Wisconsin Ave… in a spot where you have a lot of Arab business shop owners. Back in the early 80s this little strip here was a lot of what I like to call hood rich money… The legend of Rayful Edmund and Alpo and those guys, the big drug lords… they would come on this strip and drop like $5,000-$6,000 in a day in the shop… so this little strip here was always that way. How we were able to come back, being all the way up here by these flagship stores… because what you have up here is very unique… Our primary owner is a legendary music exec so he has close ties to the music industry… For us we are top tier count as far as Nikes, Adidas and Reeboks go, but the flipside is, because he has such deep roots in the entertainment industry, whenever stars come to town, like Nas and LeBron, when they are in town they come here.
Because we are a little bit off of the main strip they feel comfortable parking on a side street and coming in. We are able to give them the private shopping experience but we can still cater to the sneakerheads. We get a mix… We literally get every type of customer within a half hour range – the soccer moms, the white kids from Capitol Hill, the hood guys from Southeast all coming through this door constantly…

MDS: What’s your biggest seller right now?

Dom: Hard to say, sometimes we have days where we will sell a gang of generic surplus, other days we will only sell Jordans and the next day we’ll sell pumps. It’s never the same thing. Right now as far as per square inch we are probably number one shop wise

MDS: Yeah, there is boxes everywhere…
Dom: We are pretty much the only store that gets deliveries every day except for Saturdays and Sundays...What I can’t stress enough is that we have the most versatile staff in the world. Our kids live, sleep, eat and breath this shit. Everybody here rides BMX bikes, skateboards, long boards. We got two black guys that long board, you never see that! These are all kids that were our best customers that they all do cool shit. They are all artists, photographers… They really live this. For us to be where we are and to have as much stock as we have we can call out something that is not even on the floor and we just know where it is and what size it is. Right now we are actually showing about 3,000 footwear pieces on the floor each day… We got about 2,500 more shoes that we actually aren’t showing right now because we just can’t fit it all.

MDS: Yeah y’all could fill out a damn warehouse and you’ve got it packed into a dive bar.
Dom: Yeah, Georgetown is probably damn near just as expensive as you New York is right now rent wise... The beautiful part is the history of DC, at one point Georgetown was its own city within the city… These buildings haven’t changed in about 150 years... By law we can’t even change this…

MDS: What are your dream sneaks?
Dom: Right now I’m rockin some beat up Gucci Jordan Ones… but uh… best shoes ever, I gotta say Concord Jordan 11’s. Straight up. It’s classy, its clean, its every kid in my generation’s wet dream. That’s the best shoe in the world to me, it always will be.

MDS: Do you drink PBR?
Dom: I actually do… haha… have you ever heard of the brand Durkl?
MDS: yeah, I have.

Dom: A couple of the guys that are deeply involved in Durkl are former employees from here… when they have good parties, PBR is definitely getting passed around.

MDS: What is the easiest/hardest part of managing one of the illest shoe boutiques on the east coast? Would you say your top five on the east coast?
Dom: Honestly, I would say…we’ve traveled around, we are definitely top 5 in the world. Where we come from, we were the kids that would get on the Greyhound to go to New York to go shopping. I would say the toughest thing here is getting people to understand what it is we do. We bought this to DC so it is still a teaching method here. We still have to teach people that we were selected as one of the top 27 sneaker spots in the world to do a shoe with Adidas. That means something.

MDS: Give me the top celebs that have come in here.
Dom: Okay, top celebs that ever came through, I’d say: DJ Clark Kent, Nas, LeBron…
MDS: What did LeBron get?
Dom: LeBron, believe it or not, got some black Foamposites… size 15…
MDS: Who else?
Dom: Kevin Durant, damn I mean everybody… The whole Roots team, that’s crazy.

http://www.majordc.com/