The Bata Shoe Museum (BSM) is a museum of footwear and calceology in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The museum's building is situated near the northwest of the University of Toronto's St. George campus, in downtown Toronto. The museum building was designed by Moriyama & Teshima Architects, with Raymond Moriyama as the lead architect. The museum's collection of footwear originated from the personal collections of Sonja Bata, started in the mid-1940s. In 1979, Bata provided an endowment to create the Bata Shoe Museum Foundation, with the aim of having the collection professionally managed, and to establish a shoe museum to house, store, and exhibit the collection. The foundation exhibited the collection to the public for the first time in 1992, although it did not open a permanent facility for its museum until May 1995. , the museum's permanent collection includes over 13,000 shoes, and other footwear related items dating back 4,500 years; providing the museum with the largest collection of footwear in the world. Items in the museum's collection are either held in storage, or placed on display in its permanent exhibition. The museum also hosts and organizes a number of temporary and travelling exhibitions, and outreach programs. History The museum's collection originated from the personal collections of Sonja Bata, which arose from her interest in the products produced by her husband's company, the Bata shoe company. Sonja began collecting shoes shortly after her marriage to Thomas J. Bata in 1946, and their subsequent move to Toronto. The Bata family moved to Toronto in the 1940s in order to facilitate the company's expansion into Toronto and the Americas. In 1965, the company's headquarters was formally relocated from Zlín to Toronto (the company's headquarters was later relocated to Lausanne in 2002). By the late 1970s, the personal collection had grown to 1,500 pairs of shoes, overcrowding the company's storerooms. At the suggestion of a friend and anthropologist, Sonja Bata provided an endowment to establish the Bata Shoe Museum Foundation in 1979; an organization that would fund research into footwear and professionally manage the collection. Although the organization shared the same name as the Bata company, the foundation was established as a non-profit entity, legally separate from the Bata company. The foundation operated as a privately funded organization, as Sonja Bata opposed the creation of an institution reliant on public funds. The foundation (and later museum) is primarily funded from a trust created by