By the time he was in high school, Andy Marx already had secrets hidden in his closet: a pair of unworn, size ten Nike Air Jordan 3 sneakers.

“At first my parents didn’t realize what I was doing because I was buying my shoes and keeping them in my closet, in the box,” said Marx, financial analyst at Carle Foundation Hospital from eight to five and shoe collector 24 hours a day. “My parents though I was actually wearing the shoes, so every time I was asking them for another pair, they suspected something was going on but didn’t ask me about it until they saw my closet.”

Back then Marx didn’t have the hundreds of pairs that he has now, but “for someone in high school it was definitely odd.”

Marx started looking at shoes when he was in third grade.

“It started out as a trend where people would follow Michael Jordan and pay attention to his shoes,” Marx said. “Really it was the marketing efforts of Nike that drew me in. The product itself was pretty impressive.”

As a teenager, Marx didn’t have too much money to spend on shoes.

“I worked for a farmer, working the fields part time during the summer,” Marx said, laughing. “That definitely sounds like Champaign.”

Now, with the better financial backing to purchase shoes, Marx has more than 150 unworn pairs.

Ranging from $100 to $150 a pair, Marx always tries to buy them the day they come out because “in as little as a day, that value can go up to $250,” Marx said.

Marx’s extensive collection was a big surprise for his wife, Lynette Marx, the first time she saw his closet.

“I thought, ‘This is crazy. This guy has more shoes than any girl I know,'” said Lynette, stay-at-home mom and nurse at Provena Covenant Hospital.

Marx says that after Lynette realized the financial benefits of his shoe collection, she changed her mind. In fact, the couple has a two-year-old daughter named Kaelyn, who has a shoe collection of her own.

“I think it’s funny because I buy shoes for her that I think are cute and girly, and he buys her Jordans and these other gym shoes,” Lynette said. “And you can’t wear those with a dress.”

Although he always knew he wanted shoes to be a part of his life, growing up in the small town of Saint Joseph, Ill., without Internet, Marx didn’t know the shoe collecting epidemic would spread globally.

Knowing how popular his hobby was and ready for his collection to come out of the closet, Marx created an outlet for fellow collectors to display their shoe collection online.

In 2006, Marx established the Web site sizeten.com, where collectors could register and put pictures of their shoes online and even buy them.

Jason, who wished to stay anonymous because of his extensive collection, displays his shoes on the Web site.

“Ever since I was a child, I always looked at the newspapers and ads,” Jason said, about his interest in shoes at a young age. “It sounds silly, but (how) kids would pull out the kids’ section out of the newspaper and say, ‘I want that,’ well, I would look at the shoes like that.”

A telephone man for the Champaign telephone company, Jason has close to 500 pairs of shoes averaging $100 a pair, with some at $550.

A self-proclaimed “shoehead,” Jason said that he doesn’t collect shoes for the money, but rather for certain ones are “things that I couldn’t have as a child that I can have now.”

Jason says that collecting shoes is popular now because people who were kids when these sneakers first came out “have careers and are making some money and are willing to spend whatever it takes on what they couldn’t have as a child.”

Marx says that his shoes also have some emotional value.

“The retro shoes I buy bring back memories of 10 years ago, when maybe I didn’t have enough money to buy that shoe, but now I can,” he said. “I guess there are a lot of collectors who just buy everything, but my viewpoint and suggestion to collectors is to just buy shoes that mean the most to them.”