A 27-year-old who runs a 7-figure sneaker business made a costly mistake with fake Yeezys. It taught her an invaluable lesson about reselling.

Before Val Zapata built a seven-figure reselling business, she almost lost it all.

“I got caught early in the game with like 50 pairs of fake Yeezys that I had to swallow,” the 27-year-old entrepreneur told B-17.

Zapata, who worked as a life insurance broker before turning her sneaker-collecting hobby into a side hustle and, eventually, full-time gig, recalled buying from “a really nice guy with stacks of Yeezy slides.” She went through her standard process and ran the first pair through the LEGIT APP. It came back as authentic.

For the rest of the pairs, “I’m like, ‘I don’t want to run them all. That’s just silly. They all came from him, we’re good.'” And they cost 70% off what they were worth.

She sold all of the orange slides to her best buyer at the time.

“I drop them off. I hear nothing for weeks,” said Zapata. About four weeks after the sale, the buyer attends Sneaker Con and learns that the slides are, in fact, not authentic. Meanwhile, Zapata is in Colombia celebrating her birthday. “I’m literally out of the country. She’s blowing up my phone. She’s like, ‘All these Yeezys are fake!'”

Her heart sank.

“Not only did I have to refund my favorite client, but she never worked with me again,” added Zapata. “And I don’t blame her. I would be sketched out, too.”

It was a costly mistake. The young entrepreneur lost about $2,500, “so much money at the time,” she said. “I’m in a world of chargebacks on my insurance company. I’m donating blood to get by, and I was just starting to get the hang of it.”

Her options were limited. She could either list them for $10 to $20 as inauthentic or donate them.

“My dad was like, the only thing you do here is you be honest,” said Zapata. “I always have that in the back of my mind from my dad: If you got got, you have to just let it go. You can’t just pass it along to the next person. It was really demoralizing, honestly, and took me a little while to get over. At that time, it seemed like the end of the world.”

She ended up donating a few pairs and giving the rest away to friends and family.

“This was a big lesson for me because I was getting cocky. I was like, ‘Oh, I’m good at this. This is easy,'” said Zapata. The $2,500 lesson reinforced the importance of trusting but verifying, especially if you’re buying from a seller you’ve never worked with. “After that, I would run every single item I found through a check.”