“Just two kids from a small town in Pakistan, who escaped their conservative families” is how Sidra Qasim describes herself and her husband, Waqas Ali. Sidra and Waqas are today the energy couple behind Atoms – a New York-based footwear brand identified for its quarter sizes and comfy sneakers. But the road to results was not an straightforward one for them, and now Sidra has opened up about their journey in an interview with Humans of New York.
“It’s the same story taught to every Pakistani girl. We are raised from a young age to believe that our purpose in life is to find and keep a husband,” she says in the 1st of her 11-component interview. But even as a youngster, Sidra had larger dreams, and she held on to them even as her family members pressurized her to get married appropriate out of college.
Sidra, who belongs to the tiny town of Okara, 1st met Waqas at her aunt’s home. He was one of her aunt’s students. “We’d discuss life, and society, and human emotions. It became the only chance I had to exchange my ideas with anyone. And Waqas took my opinions seriously,” she says.
After college, she enrolled in a college and became one of the only 15 female students there. It was just after she effectively made a play to support with flood relief efforts that Waqas asked her to join him in Lahore – exactly where he had moved to study additional – and turn into his company companion.
“It finally felt as though my talents were being recognized, and the next day I asked for my parent’s permission. But they refused,” she says.
The refusal came as a blow to Sidra, who describes lying listless on the couch for weeks – to the point exactly where it scared her father. Eventually, they agreed to let her move to Lahore, exactly where she started working with Waqas on a business named ‘Social Media Art’ which aimed to support brands establish a social media presence.
As their business struggled, Waqas and Sidra grew closer. “We never discussed the status of our relationship, but both of us could feel a closeness. We were bonded by our journey. Both of us were defying our parents,” she says.
“But after a year of rejection we had begun to lose hope.”
A ray of hope came from unlikely quarters, when Sidra Qasim and Waqas Ali met with a group of craftsmen in the nearby village council of Okara. “They were making leather shoes on the floor of a two-room workshop,” she says.
Sidra returned to the workshop once again and once again for a week and, in the finish, the craftsmen agreed to collaborate with them.
While Waqas worked on the web site, Sidra ensured that the footwear they made met the highest top quality requirements.
” We called our collection ‘Hometown Shoes.’ And after we launched our website, the first order came in right away,” she says. Although they produced a loss on the order due to the higher shipping expense to France, the couple did not give up hope.
“After a year we were selling about 50 shoes per month. We were happy to have any business at all, but it wasn’t nearly enough to survive,” says Sidra. They began a very prosperous Kickstarter campaign and raised $1,07,000 in 2014 by promoting more than 600 pairs of footwear.
After that, Sidra and Waqas got married in a tiny ceremony – and straight away started to work on their application for the Y-combinator accelerator programme in San Francisco. “The admissions process was more selective than Harvard, and they’d helped launch companies like AirBnB and Dropbox,” says Sidra.
Although she describes their interview as a “disaster”, they did get by means of and moved to the US.
Their time at Y-combinator was one of creating errors and mastering from them. “We were the only company in our group who didn’t raise money. And to make matters even worse, it had been a formal event,” says Sidra, describing Demo Day which is sort of a final exam for participants of the programme. “Many of our classmates had dressed up. But none of them were wearing the shoes we had sold them.”
Doing more market place study helped them comprehend that most folks wanted footwear they could put on each and every day, and so Sidra and Waqas shifted their concentrate from formal footwear to casual.
“We researched the highest quality materials, and we put all of our findings into a document called ‘Ideal, Everyday Shoe.’ Then we gave all our notes to a talented designer. Together we built a prototype, and we called them ‘Atoms,’ because we’d gone to the atomic level in search of quality.”
It took them numerous months to manufacture their 1st collection just after substantial buyer feedback and market place study. “By the time we were ready to launch, 45,000 people had signed up for our mailing list. On the first day of sales our website crashed,” says Sidra.
Their business expanded to 25 staff, but they also had to go by means of a round of layoffs. At the starting of the pandemic, to remain afloat in the face of dwindling funds and investors unwilling to place in more revenue, Atoms expanded to creating masks.
“One year later we’ve sold 500,000 of them, and donated 500,000 more. Our shoe business has continued to grow, and once again investors are calling on the phone,” says Sidra to Humans Of New York.
She concluded the interview by speaking about the modify that her company has helped brought about. She has been in a position to support her family members back in Pakistan financially. “But more importantly I’ve provided an example,” she says.
One of her younger sisters is now working as a fitness coach, the other is promoting sanitary pads. But the greatest transformation, she says, has been in her mother – a college headmistress who now tells her students to be financially independent and understand technologies.
“She’s telling them all the things that I needed to hear as a little girl. The road was so lonely for me, and maybe I still carry some unconscious resentment,” says Sidra. “She’s telling them all the things that I needed to hear as a little girl. The road was so lonely for me, and maybe I still carry some unconscious resentment.
“But my mother has apologized for not supporting me more. And consciously I have forgiven her.”