Summary- We pay tribute to the Life of Tomáš Baťa, a man who dedicated himself to the service of humanity by way of doing only one thing, manufacturing shoes.
Bata was born in the city names Czech in Prague. Bata’s family had a history in shoemaking of more than 200 years. With help from his brother and sister, Bata invested about 320 USD to launch his own business. In the initial days, the Bata Company that well, of course, produced shoes had 10 full-time employees working a fixed schedule for regular weekly wages. This form of management was unique in those days.
Now it’s quite obvious that each entrepreneurial journey involves a series of trial and errors that drive the business towards cutting costs, enhancing revenue. Similar was the case here, where Bata countered financial difficulties in his business by sewing shoes from canvas rather than leather, a tweak that popularised his shoes. In a few years he was able to pay back all the debts.
Bata was a man with consistent yearnings of learning. He traveled to study raw shoes US, and for learning management and wage systems. He returned back to Zlin to implement profit-sharing plans. Ironically, it was a violent war that drove the peaceful business when during WW I the company received a commission for manufacturing 50,000 pairs of military shoes, which increased the number of employees in the corporation tenfold and soon it expanded across the world.
After the war, financial losses urged the company to reduce the prices which resulted in the cheap shoes taking over the market, with 112 branches in 1923. Bata was an avid planner, and an observer too with his little pen and paper never resting in his coat pockets. Undertaking extensive planning in times when management was evolving, he was able to smoothen out the processes of his company, which showed results in the form of rising productivity, and more employees.
There are so many kinds of shoes, flip-flops, heels, flat apartment shoes, running shoes, office shoes, wedges, lace-ups, and other catchy stuff, but behind all these footwear stand the shoe-makers who work hard towards enhancing the quality of human life, Bata was one of the finest of them in his skill and unique approach to this common humane necessity. Not just the shoes described as shoes in Men Shoe Blogs, Bata was a benevolent philanthropist with a rational vision, who gave his birth city an entirely new makeover. His unfortunate but inevitable demise took place in a plane crash in 1932. We duly honour the service done to humanity by virtue of Mr. Bata’s individual entrepreneurial spirit.