Puma Levitation GT sneakers (in red); Gola Harrier suede sneakers (in green). Sneaker collectors find their rare pairs are no longer so rare.

PUMA

Just a few years ago, word that Nike was about to release a limited run of a cool new sneaker would set off a frenzy. Collectors would camp outside hip sneaker boutiques, hoping to score a pair. So would entrepreneurs, who often snapped up multiple pairs that they resold for three or four times the retail price on eBay.

Today, sneaker makers of all stripes are starting to see the once-niche world of limited editions as a key strategy to market their brands. Vans is releasing about 70 different limited-edition sneakers this spring, up from about 15 in 2003, while New Balance will roll out roughly 36, triple the number in 2005. Makers say these styles can help grab the attention of influential sneaker devotees, generating buzz for the mass-market lines, too.

“We’re trying to have a trickle-down effect,” says Paul Fisher, director of global lifestyle footwear for Reebok. The company this year is launching “The V-Pack Collection,” inspired by the 1980s cartoon show Voltron and ranging from $75 to $155.

The upshot: It’s getting a lot easier to find coveted sneakers that have more cachet than your average pair of kicks. But for avid collectors — a critical group for sneaker makers to court — it’s creating concerns about watering down the value of the limited-edition concept. Already, some classic Nike styles aren’t fetching the premiums on the resale market that they did only a few years ago.

A handful of sought-after sneakers still sell out immediately. But there’s so much choice now that some store owners say most styles stay in stock for a week or longer after their release. And in the once-thriving resale market, there are signs of cooling. Three years ago, re-releases — or “retros” — of sneakers such as the Nike Air Jordan VII might have sold for as much as $600 on the secondary market, more than three times the retail price.

Chris Vidal, spokesman for Flight Club, a sneaker consignment shop with outposts in New York and Los Angeles, says most of the vintage pairs from the 1990s were snapped up around the store’s opening in 2005. He says newer pairs of limited-edition sneakers generally don’t appreciate as much as they once did. Nike’s new Air Jordan Retro 3 Lifestyle, nicknamed “Do the Right Thing” for Spike Lee’s 1989 film, for example, is selling at Flight Club for $175 to $230 — compared with its initial $135 retail price.

There is no industry standard for what defines “limited edition” — it can mean a run of 50 sneakers or tens of thousands, depending on the company. Makers typically are tight-lipped about revealing exact numbers. Collectors often rely on word of mouth or rumors posted on online message boards.

The lines are usually twice as expensive as the brands’ general releases and are sold at fewer stores, often at high-end sneaker boutiques. Designs range from a unique color or material, such as snakeskin or suede, to a more extreme sneaker makeover. A version from the Adidas Adicolor series is emblazoned with a black-and-white graphic reminiscent of the Katsushika Hokusai painting “The Great Wave Off Kanagawa.”

Puma has had limited-edition lines since the 1980s. This year, the company says it expects to roll out more than 40. But Antonio Bertone, Puma’s group functional director of brand and marketing, says he thinks the term no longer implies exclusivity. It’s a “marketing mechanism,” he says, “cartoonish and goofy.”

The explosion of limited editions is changing the culture of collecting, where the hunt for rare pairs has long been part of the allure. Collectors would go to great lengths to ensure that their pairs were highly coveted, digging through the unsold stock at mom-and-pop stores to find overlooked sneaker releases. Now, some are shifting their allegiance to smaller brands such as Vans, or harder-to-find brands such as JB Classics and Visvim.

“The purist part of the culture is being manufactured,” says collector “Hawaii” Mike Salman, who kept a pair of Nike Air Max 97s in his closet for eight years before wearing them. Nike then reissued the style, making them widely available to everyone. “There was no way that everybody else could have saved them like me,” he says.