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New Gulliver Prep graduate Marcelo Barrera was the Prep’s Silver Knight nominee for Business. Barrera built a successful business – Limitless Shoes – for himself selling sneakers online. He took that business acumen for a wildly successful community service project called Chef Santa.
It all started because of a conversation with a friend in eighth grade.
“My friend was wearing an expensive pair of shoes, like $1,000,” Barrera says. “I asked him why he would pay so much for a pair of shoes.”
His friend’s answer sent him to the Internet, to research the shoes. Those shoes sold for $200 but were so hard to get, his friend and many others were willing to overpay.
“There were bots going online and getting them before I could get them,” he says. “I started looking into it, getting these shoes. I buy and sell these shoes. I sell to this store in the design district.”
He consigns the shoes. Barrera says it usually takes about a month to sell all the pairs he has at the store.
“I take 100 pairs of shoes to that store a month,” he says. “They sell really fast! It’s turned into a good business for me.”
When he started, he sent one pair a month on consignment.
“Now at this level, on a good month with a lot of releases, it’s 100 a month,” he says.
He keeps the shoes for a while, waiting for them to go up in value. He sells them anywhere from $200-$600 a pair.
He also sells them at the StockX online store.
With his business going strong, at the start of 2021, he turned on the news and saw that people were struggling with COVID, the migrant crisis and other difficult issues.
“2020 was a good year for me,” he says. “My bots had more shoes to buy.”
He and his friend from New Jersey began talking about how they could give back to the community. They remember a guy online who had a charity named Chef Santa. That led to a live online auction.
They came with a plan to determine if they could get the bot developers to give a copy of a bot to auction off.
The charity auction ran for five days and raised more than $105,000 for charity.
“I still get goosebump thinking about it,” he says.
The money was divided up among a number of charities including UNICEF, Save the Kids – benefits migrant children in Mexico, Mental Health America, St. Jude Hospital and Heart to Heart International.
“I was allocated $2,100 for the Pelican Harbor Sea Bird Station,” he says. “I had visited with a marine science class. The ocean is my passion.”
Market conditions changed so the bots aren’t as valuable, so they have been looking at new possibilities to sell, including NFTs.
“We can still do the bot auction, but we want to raise double of what we did last year,” he says.
At school, Barrera was a peer educator for the Health Information Project, the president of the National Business Honor Society, vice-president for the Gulliver Business Club, a member of the Science National Honor Society, Rho Kappa and the National Honor Society.
He played trombone in the jazz band.
Barrera plans to attend the New York University Sterns School of Business and major in business technology and entrepreneurship.
Since he was 15 he’s volunteered at a Marine Biology Camp that he attended for years. He enjoyed going out in the water and teaching kids about the different animals.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
