Tomáš Baťa

Tomáš Baťa established the organization in Zlín on 24 August 1894 with 800 Austrian gulden (equivalent to $320 at the time), inherited from his mother. His brother Antonín Baťa and sister Anna were partners in the startup firm T. & A. Bata Shoe Company. Though this organization was newly established, the family had a long history of shoemaking, spanning eight generations and over three hundred years. This heritage helped boost the popularity of his new firm very quickly.

In 1904, Baťa travelled to Lynn, a city outside Boston, Massachusetts, in the United States that was then the center of world footwear production. He worked on an assembly line and learned about its machinery, such as Matzeliger's automated laster. He began mechanizing his production upon his return and introduced an assembly line at Zlín in 1927. With modern production and long-distance retailing, Baťa modernized the shoemaking industry. From its start, the company developed rapidly in production and its profits rose.

Tomáš Baťa obtained sole control over the company in 1908 after his brother Antonín Baťa died from tuberculosis. Tomáš brought two of his younger brothers, Jan and Bohuš, into the business. World War I created a booming demand for military shoes, which the company started to produce. During the interwar period, Baťa again visited the United States, to observe progress at the River Rouge Plant of Henry Ford in Dearborn, Michigan. Upon his return, he directed his company to look towards decentralizing operations.

Baťa recognized the needs of his customers, whose purchasing power had been significantly reduced in the aftermath of the war, and enlarged his offerings to produce low-cost shoes for the general public. He also established factories and companies in other countries, including Poland, Yugoslavia, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, the United Kingdom and, away from Europe: the United States and India. These factories were allowed to be self-sufficient and autonomous in their design, production and distribution strategies, in order to be able to cater to their local population. By the early 1930s, Bata had led the Baťa enterprise and Czechoslovakia to be the world's leading footwear exporters.

Baťa was regarded as an advocate of Taylorism, functionalism and a proponent of many aspects of the Garden city movement.

Bata is credited with efforts to modernize his hometown, both through employment and construction of housing facilities, making him a very popular citizen. He was elected as mayor of Zlín. Baťa is widely regarded as a businessman with an acute sense of social consciousness. He is quoted by many as one of the first pioneers of employee welfare and social advancement programs.

Tomáš Baťa stated:

"Let's bear in mind that the chances to multiply wealth are unlimited. All people can become rich. There is an error in our understandings - that all people cannot become equally rich. Wealth can not exist where the people are busy with mutual cheating, have no time for creating values and wealth. It is remarkable that we can find the greatest number of wealthy tradesmen and a population on a high standard of living in countries with a high level of business morality. On the other hand, we can find poor tradesmen and entrepreneurs and an impoverished population in countries with a low standard of business morality. This is natural because these people concentrate on cheating one another instead of trying to create value.We are granting you the profit share not because we feel a need to give money to the people just out of the goodness of the heart. No, we are aiming at other goals by this step. By this measure we want to reach a further decrease of production costs. We want to reach the situation that the shoes are cheaper and workers earn even more. We think that our products are still too expensive and worker's salary too low."