Atoms (shoes)
a brand of footwear

Atoms is a privately held footwear brand, based in Brooklyn, New York, that designs, develops and sells footwear. Atoms offers quarter size shoes and allows customers to buy pairs of shoes in two different sizes.
History
Atoms was founded by husband and wife Waqas Ali and Sidra Qasim in San Francisco. In 2012, they started their first footwear company as students at Forman Christian College University, Lahore named 'Markhor' (originally Hometown) in Pakistan, while working with craftsmen in their hometown of Basirpur in Okara, Pakistan. In 2015, the couple moved to Mountain View as part of Y Combinator's accelerator program. They were inspired by the challenges that most people still wear shoes that do not fit properly. The founders wanted to design a shoe that people would use every day. Atoms started selling via invite-only access on its website and built a waitlist of over 40,000 people before publicly launching on June 3, 2019.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q65052283. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2012, 2015 and 2019.
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This entry incorporates text from “Atoms (shoes)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.