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The Curious Case of Bata
How to Belong Everywhere Without Owning Anywhere
I grew up believing Bata was Indonesian. My parents thought so, too. After all, it had been here for generations — a familiar name stamped on our school shoes and leather sandals, manufactured in Purwakarta, sold in malls across the country. The logo appeared in Bahasa Indonesia. The shoes fit Indonesian feet. Case closed.
My wife, who grew up in Malaysia, had the same conviction: Bata was theirs. It was, in her words, “the Malaysian shoe brand.” She could point to the factory, the local managers, the Malay-language advertisements that had run for decades.
A Canadian friend once casually mentioned Bata as “our local company” — founded in a town called Batawa, no less, which he assumed was some Indigenous name until he looked it up.
That’s three different people, from three countries, each believing the same brand was born in their homeland. We were all wrong. And yet, somehow, we were also all right.
A Czech Birth, Two Near-Death Experiences, and the Art of Thriving Through Crisis
Bata was founded on September 24, 1894, by Tomáš Baťa in Zlín, a small Moravian town in what was then Austria-Hungary (now the Czech Republic). He started it with…
