What the Founder of Sneaker Access Built Next | PixlForm

He Built Sneaker Access as a Teenager. PixlForm Came Next.

Two weeks after Hypremium launched, Connor O'Neil was told he would have to leave his Hollywood office. He wasn't sure where he would end up.

The sneaker marketplace had gone live with approximately $2 million in listed inventory, thousands of new users and roughly $150,000 in early revenue. Ten thousand people had beta-tested the app. Sellers had been verified. Packaging had been designed.

Just as things started to look promising, Hypremium began to unravel.

FaZe Clan, which backed the company and shared an office with Hypremium, was dealing with turmoil of its own. The collective became embroiled in lawsuits involving business partner Hubrick Limited and creator Turner “Tfue” Tenney, with allegations of fraud, corporate theft and contract violations. At the same time, Hypremium was competing against platforms with far larger influencer-marketing budgets. Connor increasingly felt surrounded by people trying to take advantage of all the chaos.

"It was one of the toughest things for me to move on from – accepting the demise of it," he said.

Connor had already experienced the strange compression of a Hollywood life: too much money, access, responsibility and temptation. He had arrived from Oregon as the teenage entrepreneur behind Sneaker Access and moved into 1600 Vine, the apartment building associated with a generation of internet celebrities, including Jake and Logan Paul, King Bach, Lele Pons and Amanda Cerny.

Influencers became friends, promoters, investors and business partners. Keeping up came at a cost. Connor relied on amphetamines, energy drinks, and as many as three packs of cigarettes a day. He would sit before eight computers with three phones nearby, sometimes working for three or four days without leaving the chair.

After being cast from Hollywood, Connor would go on to build another company in a different image. Pixlform, which Connor founded in 2020, is a web design and development agency specializing in FramerPro architecture. PixlForm would be small where Hypremium had been sprawling, controlled where Hollywood had been chaotic, and sustainable where his first company had demanded everything from him.

But before Connor could start over, he needed to escape the world he had fought his way into.

Turning Energy into Obsession

Connor O’Neil grew up in Springfield, Oregon, to the east of Eugene. His grandfather founded the United States Basketball Academy, located in Blue River, where many NBA hopefuls from around the world would come to train. Yao Ming trained at the camp in 1999. Connor’s dad worked at the USBA, too. Basketball was woven into Connor’s family life, and the gym became the setting to much of his childhood.

Connor’s family moved to Bend when he was 8 years old. He played several sports and excelled as a shooting guard. In the classroom, he was restless and disengaged.

“I always hated school,” he explained. “You know, I never was good at it, really. I didn't really like being told what I had to learn.” He felt he had lots of unspent energy, and he would often ditch his schoolwork to practice basketball, stay up late at night working on side projects, or daydream about the life he wanted for himself.

When he was 14, he got a job at the local athletic club working the front desk. He would scroll through Twitter during his breaks. One day, he paused over a post: a pair of Nike Air Max Lunar90 shoes was reselling for over $1,000. Connor wasn’t a sneakerhead, so it baffled him: "People are making this much money off one pair of shoes?" he remembered thinking. "I started digging – who's getting these shoes?"

That initial question turned into an obsession. Connor studied the tools resellers used to secure limited releases and immersed himself in online botting communities. He networked heavily on Skype and Twitter to fully understand the players, the game, and the strategies used to succeed in the sneaker trade.

The Origins of Sneaker Access

Connor soon created his first of many reselling pages, Nike Carts. He focused on differentiating himself from other resale pages: he realized that many of the customers for high-value sneakers wanted a more premium and professional experience, so he curated his deals to build trust with his clients and focused heavily on the details of his branding.

He connected early on with Cameron Zoub, another teenage sneaker entrepreneur going by the online alias SoleSniper. Zoub, now co-founder and chief growth officer of Whop, showed Connor some of the growth tactics that would lead to his earliest successes. "He's the one who inspired me to start and really put me on," Connor said. He began running scripts to grow his Twitter audience, exploiting cross-posts to trigger notifications and building a reputation for delivering authentic products on time.

Around that time, Connor’s grandfather attended a meeting at the Nike headquarters in Beaverton. During the meeting, the Nike execs asked about his grandson’s business that had been using their name and logo online.“I knew I needed to change something because I didn’t want to get sued,” Connor laughed.

The new name Connor chose for his page would become legendary in the reselling universe: Sneaker Access. During the sneaker boom of the 2010s, the account became one of the most prominent sources of release news, resale offers and giveaways.

Soon after the rebrand, Sneaker Access collided with another rising force in internet culture: FaZe Clan.

FaZe Clan is an online gaming and creator collective that rose to prominence in the early 2010s through Call of Duty trick-shot videos. FaZe Rain, one of the most prominent FaZe creators, reached out to Connor through an intermediary looking for shoes. After talking, the two worked out a partnership: Rain would promote three pairs of Yeezy 350s Connor was selling in his upcoming videos.

After the promotion, Connor said his social media accounts gained 100,000 new followers in a week, across Sneaker Access and his other accounts, Supreme Access and Adidas Access.

By the end of his freshman year of high school, Sneaker Access was thriving. “I’d be in the middle of class and bring out my laptop to run orders,” he explained. “I’d be sitting there and have the opportunity to make $20,000. I thought, ‘Why am I even here?’”

He didn’t return to high school the next year. He made a compromise with his parents to attend a college credit program, which he also eventually left behind. He instead found office space directly across the street from his old high school and spent the remainder of his teenage years running Sneaker Access, building it into one of the biggest apparel reselling platforms on the West Coast.

An Industry Still Up for Grabs

Two years later, the sneaker market had changed. GOAT and StockX were turning the informal world of Twitter sales into venture-backed marketplaces. Retailers were improving their defenses against automated orders, making Connor's operation more expensive and unpredictable.

But Connor saw potential. He wanted to shape the next era of sneaker sales, not follow it.

“I had the confidence and the courage of a supervillain,” he said. “I was like, ‘I'm going to take on the industry.’ Reselling was the hottest thing at that point, and I could see how I could do it better.”

He called his idea Hypremium, a marketplace that would translate everything people trusted about Sneaker Access—its curation, immediacy, and obsessive attention to detail—into a fully realized platform. He imagined an app with the polish of luxury retail built quickly enough to challenge GOAT and StockX before the market hardened around them.

After sketching out the concept at home in Oregon, Connor spent a month running Supreme Access from a beach house in Hawaii. The business was still thriving, but he felt increasingly disconnected from his life back home. Everything he wanted seemed to be happening in Los Angeles.

When he got back home, he packed up everything he owned. Four days later, he moved into his new apartment at 1600 Vine in Hollywood. The first person he met in his building was Logan Paul.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Connor was 18, new to Los Angeles and trying to build a marketplace that required high-polish software, warehousing, seller authentication and logistics. It was a difficult road ahead, so he started with what he knew: relationship building. He started leveraging his connections through FaZe, and eventually connected with Ricegum and Metro Boomin, who would remain close collaborators.

Connor also met Ilya Zaidze, a creative director who had worked with Yeezy and A$AP Rocky’s AWGE creative collective. Ilya joined Hypremium to help articulate its visual identity and assemble a creative team.

Hypremium soon grew into a company far larger than Connor anticipated. He hired over 20 employees. Individual members of FaZe had given some seed funding, but the collective itself eventually provided even more funding. He hired engineers, designers, warehouse staff, and specialists in sneaker authentication and logistics.

Hypremium started to take shape over the next year, but the structure supporting it was simultaneously coming apart.

Connor was operating out of a Hollywood office alongside FaZe during one of the most turbulent periods in the collective’s history. In the summer of 2018, FaZe’s relationship with Hubrick, a social media company that helped orchestrate the group's rise to stardom, collapsed into dueling lawsuits filled with allegations of fraud and corporate theft, a controversy that surrounded him as he tried to bring Hypremium to market.

Meanwhile, competitors were starting to pull away. GOAT had merged with Flight Club in a deal backed by $60 million in new funding, while StockX raised another $44 million that September. Both were using their growing war chests to forge partnerships with entertainers, athletes, and gaming personalities—the same ecosystem Hypremium depended on for promotion.

Then, just two weeks after launch, Hypremium was told to leave the FaZe office. Funding dried up, too, just as the product had finally reached customers.

The company never received the opportunity Connor believed it deserved. Losing Hypremium so suddenly forced him to confront a sobering decision: whether to continue fighting or to move on.

Connor left Hollywood for Calabasas. For a time, he struggled to separate the collapse of the company from his own sense of identity. Hypremium had absorbed his money, his health, and the momentum of the business he had built as a teenager. Walking away could easily be interpreted as failure, especially for someone whose earlier successes had come from refusing to stop.

Then, his thinking changed.

“It wasn’t even giving up,” he said. “It was knowing when to move on. It was time for the next chapter in my storyline.”

Persistence and Its Limits

After Hypremium, Connor took stock of what remained. He knew how to build digital products. He understood branding, online audiences, and customer experience. He had also spent years working with developers and agencies, and he knew how frustrating it was to watch someone misunderstand or poorly execute a promising idea.

In 2020, he founded Pixlform, a web design and development agency. After years of working with agencies and creative teams, Connor understood how difficult it could be to translate a clear idea into a finished product.

“I get to be on the other end of it,” he said, “and help people articulate their vision and bring it to life.”

Today, PixlForm is based in Fountain Hills, Arizona, and operates with a three-person team: a designer, an engineer, and a motion specialist. The studio has worked with clients in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, finance, health and wellness, entertainment, and other industries. Its recent projects include websites for communications platform SignalWire and enterprise analytics company Wisdom AI, along with work for startups, creative studios, and individual founders.

The company found its niche in Framer, a visual web-development platform. Framer allows designers to build and publish within the same environment, shortening the distance between an idea and a functioning website. The platform requires specialists who understand how to turn a visual concept into a responsive, technically sound product.

That became PixlForm’s role. The company designs sites from scratch, translates existing designs into Framer, and migrates large websites from platforms such as Webflow. It also handles the technical backend work behind a site launch, too: integrating a content-management system, custom code, animations, search optimization, mobile layouts, and ongoing maintenance.

PixlForm has now designed and developed more than 100 websites. It is also recognized by Framer as a Pro Studio, an endorsement that helps distinguish it within the platform’s growing network of independent designers and agencies.

More recently, Connor has positioned PixlForm around what it calls “AI-ready” websites: clear information architecture, semantic code, structured data, accessible content, and pages that can be interpreted by search engines and AI-answer systems.

PixlForm uses AI tools to accelerate repetitive parts of production, including initial page structures, content-system setup, mobile adaptations, and controlled revisions. But Connor draws a line between accelerating the work and automating judgment. Strategy, visual identity, copy decisions, accessibility, and final quality control remain with his team.

PixlForm has remained intentionally lean, allowing Connor and his team to work directly with clients and move from concept to launch without layers of management. Connor said the company’s size lets it treat each project as its own while delivering work more quickly than a conventional agency.

Leaving Hypremium required Connor to accept that persistence can become its own trap. Walking away from the wrong future gave him the chance to build a better one.

Today, Connor uses Slash to keep PixlForm’s finances running smoothly. It cuts down on the time his small team spends on banking, leaving them more time for client work.¹

“From the first time that I got set up with Slash, I knew I was in good hands,” Connor said in a case study with Slash. “They helped me with the onboarding process and made it quick, easy, and efficient. Any issues that come up are responded to and taken seriously.”

Pixlform is one of many startups building with Slash. We're proud to support founders from day one with the financial tools they need to grow. If you're building something, we'd love to work with you. Get started today at slash.com/startups.