Canada: Shoemaker to the World

The world walks in everything from sandals and slippers to sabots and bare soles, but its largest shoemaker covets every foot — and aims to cover it. This year Canada’s Bata Ltd. (pronounced Bot-ya) will produce 190 million pairs of shoes in 3,000 styles sewn in 80 plants scattered over 67 countries. It has opened 16 plants in the past three years, last week opened another on tiny Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, and plans to build two more soon in Uganda and France. To run this mixed shoe bag more effectively, Bata next month will move into a modernistic headquarters in new suburban Toronto.

Loss to the Nazis. Canada is Bata’s adopted home. The firm was organized in Zlin, Austria (later Czechoslovakia)< in 1894 by young Shoemaker Thomas Bata, who got an idea for making shoes faster and cheaper with assembly-line techniques. Bata’s idea worked so well that he soon branched out, at his death in 1932 owned plants in 27 countries. His heirs, Half-Brother Jan and Son thomas Jr., later lost part of this empire to the Nazis and then to the Czech Communists, who expropriated the Zlin works and now turn out shoes for the East Bloc. In a memorable lawsuit that lasted nine years, Jan and thomas quarreled over the remains. Jan lost but was allowed to retain Bata’s Brazilian plant.

A Canadian citizen since 1942, thomas Bata at 50 is one of the nation’s most successful businessmen. He is also one of the most modest in his habits; he does not smoke, drinks sparingly, entertains mostly at business lunches, but allows himself the flair of driving a ’64 Mustang. Bata alternates between his Toronto office and his principal manufacturing plant at Batawa, a small town 110 miles east of Toronto named after the company. He frequently wears odd shoes to test his own against competitors’, stresses the low-price policy (no Bata shoes cost more than $18 a pair, and prices range down to a 60¢ sneaker) laid down by his father. “We have the same basic idea as old Henry Ford,” he says. “Turn out cheap good shoes for the mass market but give them style and quality.”

Two apiece. Bata’s annual sales are estimated to be around $400 million. But the company is controlled by an interlock of trusts and foundations, and the seven regions into which Bata has decentralized operations keep separate, and secret, books, Bata himself is as interested in world affairs as in money. He reads foreign policy treatises for relaxation, travels 150,000 miles annually with his svelte wife Sonja, 38, inspecting regions and making courtesy calls on Presidents and Prime Ministers. Bata hires local labor for each plant but likes to shift key men from country to country: his Algerian plant is run by an American, a Chilean is in charge of Mexico, and at Batawa the chiefs for testing and efficiency are an Indian and a Pakistani. “We are cross-pollinators,” says Bata. “We have no preferred nationality, after all, all men have two feet.