Bata Shoes
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Bata Shoes is the world's largest shoe company. It is also the world's largest family-owned company. It is currently headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland.
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The Bata Shoe Company was founded in 1894 in Zlín in what is today the Czech Republic but was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was founded by Tomáš Baťa whose family had been cobblers for three hundred years. Baťa's company, however, was a very modern industrial concern becoming one of the first mass producers of shoes.
The company grew quickly. It survived handily the upheavals of World War I and the break up of Austro-Hungary. The company quickly spread throughout Europe and developed branches in North America, Asia, and North Africa as well. In 1932 Tomáš Baťa died in a plane crash and his son Thomas J. Bata became head of the company. The younger Bata established the Canadian operation in 1939 in response to the unstable political situation in Europe.
The company set up villages around the factories for the workers and supplied schools and welfare. In the Netherlands you can find the village called Batadorp. Other villages included: Baťovany in Slovakia (present-day Svit), Baťov (nowadays Bahňák, part of Otrokovice) in the Czech Republic and Batanagar in India.
The company continued to survive in its adopted home, spreading through the developing world and opening manufacturing plants in India and throughout the world.
The Bata family and the company have been major charitable donors, especially in Canada where they have founded such projects as the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto and the Bata Library and Trent University.
In its history the company has sold 14 billion pairs of shoes.
Bata operations in Czechoslovakia
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Czechoslovakia was the home base of Bata Shoes until Nazi occupation in 1939. Apart from shoes, Baťa also diversified into other areas (tyres, toys, plastic fibres, etc.). In 1945, the company was nationalized following allegations of pro-Nazi collaboration of the company's management during World War II. It was renamed Svit and the Communist government tried to suppress all memory of Tomáš Baťa and his achievements. Baťa was portrayed as a ruthless capitalist, exploiting his workers in pursuit of higher profit. In reality, it was the Communist government which ended the prosperity of Zlín.
After the Velvet revolution, Thomas J. Bata was warmly welcome by the population and the new government upon his arrival in December 1989. However, he was not allowed to recover his nationalized property (the Zlín factory keeps operating as Svit a.s. in competition with Bata). Nowadays, Baťa a.s. (the official name of Czech subsidiary) is mainly a trading business. Apart from shoe stores, it also runs a small production facility in Dolní Němčí, a shoe museum in Zlín and Bata Foundation (Nadace T. Bati), which supports cultural and educational projects. The main street in Zlín and its university are both named after Tomáš Baťa, the founder of the corporation.
External links
- Bata International (http://www.bata.com/) Worldwide portal of Bata Shoes
- Baťa a.s., Czech operation of Bata Shoes (http://www.bata.cz/) (in Czech)