EVERY day, one million people do.
Q: Shoes?
A: Made by Bata, the 111year-old business that has some 4600 shops in 26 countries including Congo, Bosnia, Bangladesh, Canada, India, Chile, China and, of course, the Czech Republic.
Q: Why of course?
A: The Bata shoe company was founded in Zlin in what was then Czechoslovakia in 1894 by Tomas, Anna and Antonin Bata. Tomas took over the business a year later and made the first fabric shoe, called the Batovka. He introduced profit sharing and built houses, schools and hospitals for employees and their families. He encountered his first major hurdle in 1929.
Q: Platform shoes?
A: Customs tariffs. He responded by building factories in the United States, India and across Europe, including one in Cumnock, Ayrshire. But the challenges faced by Tomas, who died in an aeroplane crash in 1932, were nothing compared with those that confronted his successor, his son (whose christian name was spelled Thomas).
Q: What were they?
A: First, the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia which forced Thomas to flee his homeland. He set up business anew in Batawa near Toronto.
Thomas served with the Canadian army in the Second World War. Any hopes he had of returning home after the war were dashed when all of Bata's business in communist Eastern Europe was nationalised.
Czechoslovakia declared Bata a capitalist evil.
Q: Did Thomas stamp his foot in anger?
A: He broadcast his support for democracy to East European dissidents on Radio Free Europe. In 1989, the year of revolutions that brought down the Iron Curtain, Thomas was invited by Vaclav Havel, then the Czech Republic president-in-waiting, to take the business back home. Thomas, who is now 91, was delighted to accept.
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