THE SOULS OF A SHOE

They escaped their restrictive childhoods in Pakistan. Now their shoe brand Atoms makes $12 million a year. But getting there required a lot of failure, and a willingness to start over.

- LIZ BRODY

No one knows exactly when Sidra Qasim was born. Her mother's best guess is three or four days before a famous 1986 cricket match in which Pakistan defeated India by one wicket. So in a harbinger of how she would define her life, Qasim chose her own birthday.

As one of six siblings growing up outside of the small city of Okara, Pakistan, next to farms of mustard leaves, oranges, and mangos, she always asked why things couldn't be different. Why, for starters, were millions of girls like her expected to stay home, to raise a family, and to have their lives dictated by the men around them?

Qasim kept asking why, again and again, until she finally met her own expectations. What did that look like? Her company, called Atoms, was cofounded with her husband, Waqas Ali, and bringing in $12 million a year; sneakers made by that company on the feet of Reddit co-founder (and Atoms backer) Alexis Ohanian at the Met Gala, one of fashion's most coveted red carpets; and a 13,000-square-foot warehouse in Brooklyn as HQ for that company-one with its own art gallery, and massive windows out of which, one warm afternoon, she would look out across the East River, to Manhattan's skyline and beyond.

Not on the day she was born-nor the day she chose-would the conservative Muslim community around her have imagined how far she would go, and how little she'd let her mind drift to her small hometown half a world away. "It's hard," she says, "to come back."

QASIM DOESN'T KNOW why she grew up challenging everything; it wasn't like her family encouraged it. But her questions took on a particular urgency when she was 17, and her mother invited a matchmaker over to their home.