Thomas Bata dies at 93

Shoe tycoon and owner of the corporation of the same name, Thomas Bata, died yesterday at the age of 93 years. I heard an interesting story about Bata, and the early days of the international development of his global shoe business. He sent a salesman to India, who returned a failure, with terrible news; "Indians don't wear shoes". That salesman was fired and another hired in his place. Bata told the new salesman that "everyone in India should be considered a customer!". Today there are over 1200 Bata shoe stores in India, and it continues to be one of the company's largest sales regions.

Leslie Tenenbaum, the company's general counsel, said Bata died early yesterday in Sunnybrook Hospital only weeks before his 94th birthday.

Tenenbaum did not give Bata's cause of death. He said a company statement will be issued later. Funeral arrangements were not immediately known.

Bata is survived by his wife, a son and three daughters.

Bata's father, Tomas, founded the shoe empire in 1894 in Zlin, in what is now the Czech Republic. It would later swell into the giant Bata Shoe Organization.

Thomas Bata was born on Sept. 17, 1914. He fled Czechoslovakia for Canada in 1938 with the rise of Nazism in his homeland. He ran the shoe company from the 1940s into the 1980s.