Mad Kicks Is a Family Affair—and the Triangle’s New Home Base for Sneakerheads

For the unfamiliar, sneaker resale stores can be intimidating. Sometimes shoes are wrapped in plastic to protect them, and like in a museum, you’re not sure if it’s permissible to touch the goods.

Also—much like in a museum—there’s an overwhelming abundance of sensorial pleasure: the colors, the styles, the artful display. These are not the racks at Foot Locker or Dick’s, but rather a special place for shoe people, from the casual consumer purchasing a new pair of Pandas to the hypebeast looking for the latest drop.

Some pairs of shoes might cost half a paycheck or more; others are less than what you’d pay at a sporting goods store. It’s on you to know why. If you’re a sneakerhead, you probably already know what you are looking for, but there’s always the possibility of surprise, a shoe you didn’t expect to find. 

Every sneaker store visit is an opportunity, not just to score but to connect.

That last bit I learned from Larry Antunez Lopez and Michel Antunez Lopez, the pair of brothers who own and operate Mad Kicks in downtown Durham, the first sneaker and streetwear shop to grace Main Street. There’s no plastic wrap on the shoes at Mad Kicks and customers can try everything on (this can be a big deal in sneaker stores, which have to worry about creases that devalue the product). 

Creating a welcoming brick-and-mortar space is important to the Antunez Lopez brothers, who started their business four years ago in an unused corner of their mother’s Herbalife café on Roxboro Street. Larry, who is now 19, was too young at the time to file the paperwork to start his own business, so he asked Michel, four years his senior, to be his partner.

“He just texted me one day and was like, ‘Hey what do you think of the name Mad Kicks?’ And I was like, ‘Yo, that’s dope,’” Michel says. “I didn’t have the mind for reselling—it was his idea. Our mom had this little 12-by-12 space she wasn’t using, so I was like, let’s make it—let’s open a sneaker store.”

At the time, Michel had recently graduated from Northern High and was already working, so he had some funds to invest ($1,000) to start the store. With help from their stepfather, a contractor, the teens installed walls and shelves in the Roxboro Street space. “We got the location down; next step: inventory,” Michel says. “We basically started off with two shoes.” 

Larry, then 15 and a freshman at Durham School of the Arts, wasn’t living at home and was having a tough time with quarantine: “I started this business because I wanted the latest sneaker,” he says, “but also because it was another way to get out.”

“You had to put a lot of effort for me to even show up to class, let alone when you did it online—I’m definitely not showing up to class,” he adds. “But I knew that I did not want to stay in that position forever. I’ve always had the drive at a young age, and I always knew that I was going to be an entrepreneur somehow, some way—even as a kid, before I even knew what the word ‘entrepreneur’ was. I just knew that I was going to do something for myself, build something.”

“We always had a love for shoes,” Larry adds—he’s wearing an Off-White T-shirt, the brand founded by legendary designer Virgil Abloh. It’s one of several streetwear brands the downtown shop resells, alongside other popular independent labels like Denim Tears, Essentials, Hellstar, Bape, and Supreme. “But we didn’t grow up in the nicest part of Durham—so that’s always just been a dream that, you know, a lot of kids have: ‘Oh, I want the newest Jordans.’ But depending on where you grew up, you can’t always have the latest Jordan.” 

“I can’t say that I was a sneakerhead when I started because I was still wearing Vans or Converse—whatever my mom could buy,” Larry continues. “I didn’t grab my first pair of sneakers until a couple of months after opening the store. It was my birthday, and I was like, OK, I have a sneaker store now. I might as well treat myself.”

Aside from that special pair of Jordan 5 Retro “metallic white,” all the money the brothers made from buying and reselling shoes went right back into the business as they slowly began to grow the inventory. While the first location was small, there was a mural inside the store the brothers painted with a friend that depicted downtown Durham. 

“You saw the skyline, the tower, the exact buildings—that’s because every time we walked in me and my brother had a goal,” Larry says of the brothers’ shared vision to move the store downtown. “We are where we wanted to be, back then, but now that we are here, we’ve got new goals.”

By building up from just two pairs of shoes, the Antunez Lopez brothers are, in their own way, replicating the assent of streetwear globally, which came from the ground up, a cultural movement that started in the streets and has grown to influence—and sometimes even eclipse—high fashion.

What started in Black culture based on utilitarian clothing created by a confluence of underground communities in hip-hop, sports, and skateboarding, is so mainstream that today you’ll find it at any mall. But malls are not where you’ll find the coolest stuff, which is harder to come by: the independent brands that inspire the most awe. For that kind of selection, you’ll have to find a store like Mad Kicks.

Sneaker resale stores are highly curated, reflecting not just the buyer’s eye, but also the people who sell and shop there. 

“A huge part of our business is buy/sell/trade,” Michel says. “We are here downtown with all these new apartments and condos popping up …. A lot of our sneakers that end up on the wall come from our customers.”

The growth in nearby residential units is an asset to the Main Street location, a former attorney’s office that Mad Kicks moved into in October 2023, a few doors down from Bull City Records. Historically, the block was one of the city’s earliest retail areas, though that hasn’t been the case during the last few decades; mostly, you’ll find the fading names of legal firms spelled out across storefronts. 

The brothers invested in sweat equity and very little cash to build the store out to what it is today: an inviting, modern space where color-coded sneakers are neatly aligned on shelves that line two walls (the third wall holds racks of clothes).

But with only a handful of apparel stores that are pretty far apart, downtown isn’t a big shopping center and customers can be scarce. (In her response to an email inquiry, Gina Rozier, the director of marketing and communication for Downtown Durham, Inc., supplies these stats: of the 77 retail stores located downtown, 14 sell apparel and two sell shoes: Mad Kicks and Bull City Running.) Still, regulars and people who work downtown will drop by on lunch breaks to chat. Streetwear and sneaker aficionados drive in from other cities to check Mad Kicks out, spreading the word.

According to Larry, many times people are shocked to hear the location: “It’s like, bro, what?!” he says. “If I told you five years ago, you wouldn’t believe me, because downtown was only a place you went to when you got court or something. Just to say that there’s retail that sells high-end sneakers and clothing in downtown Durham—you got to take that in.”

In July, Mad Kicks organized an event called Mad Streetwear Market to showcase local streetwear designers and sneaker vendors. With food trucks and live entertainment, they hoped to create a space for independent streetwear brands across the Triangle.

“It’s cooler when you can meet the person who made the clothes instead of supporting big corporations,” says Michel, of the store’s support for local designers and makers. While the event was successful, they can’t get the venue to return calls to plan the next pop-up.

“We want to create a streetwear community here in this city,” Larry explains. “A lot of people think Durham is liberal, that people are always open to more styles and more identities coming through. But sometimes they don’t like that. We had the turnout; it was good, but it wasn’t what [the venue] expected. We reach out and I’m like, ‘Hey, y’all wanted people to pop out and it worked, so can we do it again?’”

“We don’t let that stuff knock us down,” Michel replies.

Since opening, the growing workload has necessitated adding two new store staff members. 

“We are on track—we are slowly increasing the team and starting to grow. Hopefully, we open a second location in the future,” Larry says. He’s taking an online real estate course in preparation. (“I’m schooling now,” he jokes when reminiscing about his reluctance to attend high school, which he graduated from in 2023.) 

Larry sees Mad Kicks as both a passion project and as part of a portfolio that the two brothers will grow—and continue, always, to own. 

“We want people to come in here and to know that whenever they come here, they can talk about shoes, fashion; they can let out,” Larry says. “When people come in, they talk directly to me and my brother.”

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