MKBHD sneaks in a shoe collab with Atoms

In 2022, MKBHD bought a face mask from “everyday” fashion company Atoms. The brand was founded by Sidra Qasim and Waqas Ali in 2019, and face masks were only the third product it’d released in three years of operating. Its first two products were Model 000, a unisex pair of black shoes, and Model 001, a unisex pair of white shoes.

When Qasim and Ali realized MKBHD (aka technology YouTuber Marques Brownlee, who’s got nearly 17 million subscribers) had ordered from Atoms, they decided to hit him up.

“We reached out to him and said, ‘We are fans of you, and we love the way you explain products,'” Qasim told Fast Company. “‘We would love to see if there is a world where we can work together to design a sneaker.'”

Brownlee wasn’t immediately sold. He’d had other sneaker collab conversations before, but was put off because “there was not a lot of flexibility for actual input on the shoe,” he told Fast Company.

But with Atoms, “it became very clear very quickly that this is a new thing for both of us, and we could actually learn together and make something completely new and awesome,” he said.

That “something” is Model 251, a sleek pair of black-and-red high-top sneakers named after the length of Brownlee’s first tech-themed YouTube video–two minutes and 51 seconds.

“I’m not a shoe designer, but I do have a lot of shoes that I really like, and I have different elements sort of frankensteining together my ideal shoe, my daily-wear shoe, in my head,” Brownlee said.

He added that most of his input at the beginning of Model 251’s design was “aesthetic,” but “I very quickly surfaced the other side of that coin, which is that it needs to be structurally sound and it needs to be well built. And those also have to work in harmony with the aesthetics.”

Atoms describes the finished product as a “partnership between two innovative minds with a shared love for creativity, functionality, and quality.” It’s selling Model 251 as a limited edition until May 23. Each pair costs $189, will be made to order, and will be delivered in July and August of this year.