By Nathyn Gilgeous
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writer
Is any outfit complete without the kicks? The team at Esteem DC would probably argue no.
The team consists of Nick Viselli, Kevin Nguyen, Juni Mahmood, Andrew Gerbasi, and Vahagn Aghekyan – all 25-year-olds, except for 24-year-old Mahmood, who have been selling rare sneakers, streetwear, and vintage clothing to DMV customers for five years now from Esteem DC at 5912 Georgia Ave. NW. Esteem opened its doors in 2018 to customers willing to invest or sell unique kicks for hundreds, even thousands of dollars.

Store owners Nguyen and Viselli credit their success to getting into the sneaker game early.
“I was 15 when I got my first nice shoe, a pair of the Electro-lime Foamposites,” said Viselli, referring to the special technology used to create a sneaker debuted in 1997 by NBA player Penny Hardaway.
“Mine were a pair of stealth 10s,” Nguyen said of the popular Michael Jordan shoe. “Next I got a pair of Military blue fours.”
After buying their first pairs of rare sneakers, the two were hooked and began buying more and more pairs.
The Gen Z entrepreneurs met while in high school and quickly bonded over their love of sneakers. The pair bought, sold, and traded sneakers with their classmates.
Viselli’s ambitions long outranked his interest in school, although he described himself as an intellectual who took eight business classes and passed with As.
“I knew business was what I wanted to do in some type of way,” Viselli said. “After I took those classes, I didn’t care about all the other ones.”
The pair decided to start a business restoring sneakers before eventually reselling them.
“We started doing restorations at first, fixing up shoes, doing repaints, re-icing the soles,” Nguyen explained. “We moved from that to selling sneakers, buying a whole collection, and flipping it like that.”
After graduating from high school, they started Esteem. The pair had managed to save 25 pairs of sneakers and $1,500 in profit from their restoration business. Initially, they sold their shoes online and through local forums, or met up with potential customers in parking lots, schools, malls and at local events like SneakerCon. Occasionally, sales were transacted in their three-bedroom apartment.
“We had a two-bedroom apartment with three dudes in it,” Viselli said. “The first room had three beds and we all slept in there, the living room was where all our stuff was, shoes, clothes, all that.”
In 2016, the duo was approached by two other partners who were looking to open a store. Months later, the pair opened the original Esteem in Ashburn, Virginia.
“We were there for two years,” Nguyen said. “We knew we wanted to come to the city because there is more going on out here. It’s better here. There are more shoes.”

Photos courtesy of the Esteem DC instagram page, @Esteem.dc

Wanting to get away from their partners at the time, Viselli and Nguyen moved to Washington DC, in 2018 and opened the Georgia Avenue location. Mahmood, Gerbasi and Aghekyan joined the staff.
Every Friday, the store does restock of new sneakers. This most recent restock featured rare sneakers like The Stingwater edition Nike SB Dunk, The A-Ma Manière Air Jordan 3, and the Sean Cliver Nike SB Dunk.
For the young business owners, there was a learning curve to opening a store. Running a sneaker store requires interacting with customers constantly and dealing with demanding customers from time to time.
“When we opened, a lot of the money we saved went to the not-fun stuff, like deposit, business license, that stuff,” Viselli said. “There was a lot of stuff I had to learn, like accounting, keeping track of inventory. Stuff I wish I had just kept up with instead of having to learn on the spot.”
Despite struggling a bit during the pandemic and the election unrest that sparked marches and protests, the store is back in business. Viselli and Nguyen said the next big move is to open another location in Virginia eventually.
“We were closed for about a month total between the pandemic and the protests,” Viselli said. “It’s a year later, and we still haven’t opened that store yet. We’re finally about to do it within the next couple of months.”
The store employees hand curate and authenticate all its items,” the young businessmen explained. Customers will sometimes get up in arms at having their items turned down, but Viselli said it is more important to maintain a good reputation in the sneaker community for the store.
The store’s employees are experts in streetwear and sneakers, and keep up with the trends in pricing, new releases, and potential big sales. The authentication process is in-depth, Viselli said, explaining that the box’s shoes are thoroughly checked, which sometimes includes using a special black light to verify authenticity. The employees spend a lot of time on the internet researching the best ways to authenticate items that come in the store.
“Reddit is a really dope tool,” Aghekyan said. “I learn a bunch of stuff there.”
In addition to sneakers, the store also buys and sells streetwear, collectibles, designer items, and Esteem branded merchandise. The store is currently home to 700 sneakers and sees more than 1,000 people a week.
Viselli said he hopes that Esteem is known as a cool store in the sneaker landscape of the area. In fact, the store has sponsored several events, including hosting a pop-up event for local rapper A$AP Ant’s brand Marino Infantry.

“There are a lot of stores who have a reputation for being rude or lowballing, or just not being good people, we don’t ever wanna be that,” Viselli said. “We just wanna be cool and humble.”
Viselli and Nguyen said their hope is to own multiple stores within the next five years and have a bigger team of employees.
“I’d like to have a bigger store, a bigger team, and more online stores,” Viselli said. “I really just wanna build a dream store for people. I wanna be that spot that people know, the cool store. I wanna be that store that when you think about something, you know we got it.”
1 Comment
Dope to see young men grow their interests into businesses! Nice article.