Kidding aside, kids do need good shoes, but they’ll also need new shoes every 6 months or more, so $500 is definitely out of the question for most parents.
It must be a signal product or something. Quite frankly I don’t mind those, because it only steals money from dumb rich people. If I were to start a business that’d be my segment too. It’s easier to find 10 customers willing to pay a $1000 for a bag of shit than it is to find 1000 customers willing to pay $10 for the same bag of shit.