Zlín: the Detroit of Moravia

Czechast visits Zlín to explore “The Baťa Principle,” the signature exhibition at the Museum of Southeast Moravia. It traces the Baťa company’s rise from a village workshop to a global brand through shoes, film, and travel. Step inside a functionalist city that still runs on Tomáš Baťa’s energy.

The spirit of a unique city

Tomáš Baťa|Photo: SOkA Zlín, č. NAD: 1294, č. obálky: 146/Tomáš Baťa Memorial

Zlín doesn’t look like other Czech cities. Instead of Gothic spires or Baroque churches, there are long lines of red brick, glass façades, and grids of numbered buildings. The city’s modern order and rhythm came from Tomáš Baťa, a shoemaker who, as marketing manager Sylvie Lečiková puts it, “turned a small provincial town into a super-modern city within one lifetime.”

That vision—both industrial and social—is now captured in one place: the Museum of Southeast Moravia. Its permanent exhibition, The Baťa Principle, occupies a former factory hall that once produced thousands of pairs of shoes. It reflects the very world Baťa created, and how it shaped the city around it.

Three stories under one roof

The exhibition tells Zlín’s history through three interconnected stories: the Baťa company, its film studio, and the travels of Jiří Hanzelka and Miroslav Zikmund. Each of them reveals a different side of the same idea—the drive to act, build, and explore.

Shoe Museum in Zlín|Photo: Saskia Mišová, Czech Radio

The first section, curated by Michal Heinrich, displays footwear from the earliest Valachian-style shoes of the 1890s to elegant 1930s designs and post-war sports models. “The collection began naturally,” Heinrich explains. “Baťa employees traveled worldwide to find materials and study competitors—and brought shoes back.” Early production nearly failed: “Everyone here was making the same warm winter shoes, so they almost went bankrupt,” he says. The breakthrough came with the lighter ‘Sago’ shoes, made partly from textile, which were cheaper and suddenly sold everywhere.

The displays trace how Baťa’s workshop became an industrial enterprise that revolutionized production. In the 1920s he reorganized factories, linked workers’ pay to output, and—after visiting Ford’s Detroit—introduced conveyor-belt shoemaking. “He was the first in the world to make shoes on conveyor belts,” Heinrich says. “A brilliant idea, and it worked.”

Production in the Baťa factory in Zlín, 1935|Photo: SOkA Zlín, FAZ, obálka 6653

Shoes that tell stories

Among the objects are wooden-soled models made during wartime shortages and a special 1939 collection prepared for the New York World’s Fair, which never left Czechoslovakia after the Nazi occupation. Some cases hold curiosities: a shoe made from hamster fur crafted as a master-exam piece in Prague, and an enormous pair designed for a man from Brno with 41-centimeter feet.

Heinrich points to one display that often stops visitors: a set of tiny, embroidered Chinese lotus shoes for bound feet, from the 19th century. “They’re beautiful, but they also show how far people will go for fashion or status,” he says.

8 photos

Film and the wider world

A second part of the exhibition recalls Baťa’s film studio, founded to make advertisements and training films. It soon became a creative hub where young Czech and Slovak filmmakers learned their craft. Cameras, lighting equipment and film posters show how industry and art merged in Baťa’s city, which even today has its own film school and university.

Tatra car that Zikmund and Hanzelka used|Photo: Vít Pohanka, Radio Prague International

The third section belongs to Hanzelka and Zikmund, two young travelers from Zlín who persuaded the company to support their expeditions in the late 1940s. Their journeys through Africa, South America, and Asia produced thousands of photographs and popular travel books. They became national celebrities, later silenced by the communist regime. The museum presents a fraction of their archive—images, diaries, maps, and film reels—reminding visitors that Zlín’s spirit was never confined to factory walls.

A city crystallized in a museum

Zlín’s order, optimism, and openness—its “Baťa principle”—run through every part of the exhibition. “You simply cannot visit Zlín without hearing the name Baťa,” says Lečiková. In the museum that idea takes tangible form: design, work, and curiosity fused into one narrative of modern Czech identity.

Buildings number 14 and 15 (museum, art gallery and library)|Photo: Olga Vasinkevič, Radio Prague International

Visitors can walk through a century of innovation in a single hall and see how one company’s experiment in industry and society became a whole way of life. What happened here was local and global at the same time—and this museum holds the evidence.

For more background, photographs, and the full interviews with Sylvie Lečiková and Michal Heinrich, listen to the audio episode of Czechast devoted to Zlín and The Baťa Principle.