Fire in Zlín destroyed the headquarters of Vasky. Václav Staněk has started from scratch before

Firefighters battled a blaze throughout the night in one of the buildings of the Baťa factory complex. Fourteen units of professional and volunteer firefighters were involved in extinguishing the fire, and aircraft with bambi buckets were also used.

However, the headquarters and warehouse of the well-known shoe company Vasky could not be saved. It's somewhat ironic. The owner of the company, Václav Staněk, had admired Tomáš Baťa since his school days, and inspired by his business success, he too wanted to build his own enterprise.

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Vasky Staněk built almost from scratch

He started with it at just eighteen years old, after spending a year preparing, and as soon as he reached adulthood, he began making shoes with his father, who produced work boots.

"I had an initial capital of 30 thousand crowns for Vasky, and it really was enough for the whole start-up of the company. And that's because I had a lot of great friends. A graphic designer who created our logo. A classmate who took our first photos in exchange for shoes. We really managed to get it running with very little,"

recalled in an exclusive interview for LP-Life.cz, which Václav Staněk gave during the COVID pandemic.

The recent fire brought the company almost back to square one, where Václav Staněk started. The Svit area, which was engulfed by fire, got its name during a renaming campaign in the city by the communist government of socialist Czechoslovakia, which attempted to erase the tradition linked to the world-famous entrepreneur from people's memory.

Not many from the younger generation recall Gottwaldov today, but the term Svit is still used for Baťa’s industrial area. However, the Baťa tradition has not been eradicated from the place. Although the area is primarily a tourist destination where people visit mainly Baťa’s skyscraper with the famous office in the elevator, some parts of the complex still house manufacturing companies.

In Vasky, they've never hidden their inspiration from Baťa

Although Vasky has lost its headquarters and the damage to the stored shoes amounts to approximately 150 million crowns, it plans to use another building it owns in the complex where the shoes are produced. That the company uses spaces in the Svit complex is no coincidence, as Baťa was Staněk's role model from the very beginning.

“We reference the Baťa tradition and we are from Zlín, we produce in the Czech Republic. So it plays a certain role. It's not like we're using his name because it suits us. We really mean it, he has long been my role model. For me, the greatest entrepreneur that has ever been here,”

stated the entrepreneur for LP-Life.cz and admitted to a passionate reading of books with a Baťa theme.

Although the fire is a great tragedy that also damaged part of a unique historical complex, for Vasky, it's certainly not the end. Václav Staněk has been able to develop the company even from minimalist beginnings and is already planning how to get back to it and perhaps start working "in cafes" again.

"It's constant work. In the first year, we had a turnover of one million crowns, the next year 4.5 million, then 12, and so on. So it may seem that there were some leaps, but it was constant brand building and finding new and newer channels and moving forward. So it's not really possible to say there was a specific breakthrough because we sold through those cafes for quite a long time. The jump was mainly in the online environment. It wasn't really that I was going around cafes. Rather, someone would order through social media and then we would hand them over there," Václav Staněk recalled some time ago.

Sources: original text, editorial team, SeznamZprávy, Novinykraje.cz, Kudyznudy.c