Underskog

Each month, we are inviting speakers to share their maker stories. These talks are going to be showcasing interesting DIY and maker projects, inspiring scientific experiments, stories of craftsmanship, anecdotes on product design, hardware development and what it takes to get from idea to manufacturing and building a successful company.

Maker Stories are more than a series of talks, you can meet fellow makers and catch our guests and their products in a pop-up shop in the MESH Café!

About our speaker: David Bonney of ATHEIST Shoes
Shoes for godless people – an unlikely business idea that somehow worked

ATHEIST Shoes was founded in 2012. Originally little more than an aimless folly, it overnight attracted a huge swell of support in social media and has since sold shoes everywhere from Tokyo to Saudi Arabia.

Dubbed by one journalist as “The Life of Brian of Footwear”, the brand’s story is in many ways atypical for 2014 – it has a real product, for one thing, when most start-ups seem to be digital or tech. But in other ways ATHEIST is a child of its times – founded on values rather than value, and only possible thanks to ideas like crowd-sourcing, the longtail, and the increasing democratisation of expertise in things like production and design.

At heart, ATHEIST is a purposeful brand, über-close to its customers in the pursuit of a common social goal – that atheists be more open about their atheism. But it’s also got a purpose of broader relevance, seeking to pull down the pants of the footwear megabrands and to outstrip them in quality, service and ethics.

ATHEIST was topsy turvy in its creation – breaking many of the rules and chronologies of how you’re meant to start a business. And our complete lack of relevant experience meant we had no right to succeed.

But that lack of experience might also be why we did.

In the last 24 months we’ve been featured in TIME and Fast Company, had tear-stained letters of thanks from the Bible Belt, used science to demonstrate discrimination against atheism by the US Postal Service, adorned the feet of Eddie Izzard and had customers tell us we’ve made “the most comfortable shoe in the world”.

And I don’t think any of that would have been possible had we known what we were doing.

We hope bits of the ATHEIST story will be interesting for anyone about to launch a consumer-facing brand, or any business that has to deal with people really.