Nowadays there's a specific shoe for every style, music category, and dance move. But a shoe specifically for atheists? Only in San Francisco. And Germany.
ATHEIST Shoes, a young brand out of Berlin, is coming to San Francisco this weekend to catch up with their largest following (of course). The brand was founded in 2012 with support from Reddit and Kickstarter. 385 atheists pledged money to the first batch of shoes and in the two years since, they’ve sold everywhere from Tokyo to Saudi Arabia and been featured by Fast Company, Time, and NPR.
Designed in Berlin to Bauhaus principles, and handmade in Portugal, according to their website, ATHEIST shoes are so soft "it's like walking on hugs from baby kittens"—characteristics I normally wouldn't associate with the faithless demographic.
The best part, though, are the soles—embossed with wry bulletins of godlessness such as “Ich Bin Atheist” and “Darwin Loves,” ATHEIST shoes allow wearers to out themselves and flirt with fellow heathens—like Grindr for the agnostic.
But things haven't been all puppies and warm hugs for ATHEIST shoes; in 2013 they published the results of a scientific experiment that demonstrated discrimination by the US Postal Service against packages marked with ATHEIST-branded packing tape. According to the results, ATHEIST packages arrived 3 days later than neutral packages and were 10 times more likely to disappear completely. Interesting...
Since then, they've decided to treat their shoes like drinking tall boys in the daytime, wrapping them in anonymous brown paper without labels.
Grab a heathenish pair for yourself at the pop-up this weekend.
Pop-up: 11:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m., Friday, June 6 to Sunday, June 8, at Fine Arts Optical, 888 Valencia Street.
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