LEG A CY
LEAVING A LASTING FOOTPRINT
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onja Bata has three lasting legacies to her name—the family shoemaking business she guided to global success, the museum she founded to exhibit her
impressive collection of footwear, and her many descendants, one of whom married into another prolific Canadian family. The Swiss-Canadian businesswoman died
after illness, aged 91, in a Toronto hospital on 20 February. She was hailed as a passionate collector, philanthropist, world traveller and business leader by the Bata Shoe Museum she established. Her thirst for knowledge was both “infectious and inspirational” and “her drive for design excellence permeated every facet of her life and she encouraged this from those around her,” Sheila Knox, acting museum director, said. Born into a traditional Zurich family of
lawyers in 1926, Sonja Ingrid Wettstein studied architecture at the city’s Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at the age of 19 until she met second-generation Czech shoemaker Thomas Bata and became a homemaker. The family-owned Bata Shoe Company had been founded to mass produce footwear in 1894 by Thomas’ father, also called Tomas, and his siblings Anna and Antonín. However, the company was stripped of its assets by the post- war communist regime and the couple rebuilt the family business from their new home in Toronto. The couple were married from 1946 until Thomas died in 2008 at the age of 93. Sonja handled product development and
marketing in the partnership and designed pop-up retail stores for the company to ship and open around the world. Staff welfare, sustainability, and environmental protection continue to be long-standing family values. The family continues to be known for
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building Czech-inspired townships around its factories for its workers. Since the 1940s, the intrepid Bata collected
and stored in her basement about 1,500 pairs of rare, traditional, historical, and celebrity-owned shoes from family holidays and business trips around the world. Her passion led to the establishment of the Bata Shoe Museum Foundation in 1979 which in turn led to the opening of its shoebox-shaped museum in Toronto in 1995. The museum draws on a collection of more than 13,000 artefacts from 4,500 years of history. Bata was appointed an Officer of the Order
of Canada in 1983 and was an Honorary Naval Captain for more than 24 years. The National Design Council, World Wildlife Fund Canada, the Council for Business and the Arts in Canada, and Junior Achievement were among the many organisations she supported. Still family-owned and based in its relocated
global headquarters in Lausanne, Bata Brands employs 35,000 people and sells 400 million shoes a year from 4,900 stores in more than 70 countries. Sonja Bata is survived by Thomas Bata
Jr, Christine Schmidt, Monica Pignal and Rosemarie Bata, in addition to nine grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. Granddaughter Alexandra Schmidt married Galen Weston Jr, fourth-generation chief executive of another major Canadian family enterprise, George Weston Ltd. Stanley Pignal, a financial journalist based
in Mumbai and a fifth-generation descendant of Tomas Bata, said Sonja Bata “politely, but firmly, defied conventions that women didn’t belong in boardrooms, that firms existed solely to make profits, that shoes were just things people wore and didn’t matter, or that you couldn’t be defiant yet a doting granny”.
ICON
Sonja Bata (1926 – 2018)
Swiss-Canadian business leader and philanthropist
1926
SONJA WETTSTEIN BORN IN ZURICH, SWITZERLAND ON 8 NOVEMBER
1946 WEDS THOMAS BATA, HEIR TO THE BATA SHOE COMPANY
1979 ESTABLISHES THE BATA SHOE FOUNDATION TO FUND RESEARCH AND HOUSE COLLECTIONS
1935 BATA COMPANY MAKES 168,000 PAIRS OF SHOES A DAY
1938 COUPLE MOVES OPERATIONS FROM ZLIN, CZECH REPUBLIC TO SOUTHERN ONTARIO, CANADA
1939 FOUNDS BATAWA TOWNSHIP, BETWEEN TORONTO AND OTTAWA, AROUND ITS SHOE FACTORY
1995 BATA SHOE MUSEUM OPENS IN TORONTO
1996 BATA COMPANY SELLS A MILLION SHOES A DAY
2018 SONJA BATA DIES IN TORONTO, CANADA ON 20 FEBRUARY
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