Ostrava-born Ing. Hugo Vavrečka grew up in a mining environment on the right bank of the Ostravice River as the son of a mining serious. He graduated from the real school in Moravská Ostrava and then went to Brno to study, where he graduated from the German Technical University (1904, mechanical and electrical engineering). He started as an assistant at the Czech Technical College in Brno (1905), an operator of an engineering and electrical engineering consultancy (1905-1907) and a national economic editor of the Brno People's Newspaper ( 1907-1914). He spent World War I as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Navy in Trieste (1914-1918). Immediately after the war, he entered the service of Czechoslovak diplomacy as a government plenipotentiary (1918) and a participant in the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 (expert in the economic and transport sector). He was soon appointed consul general in Hamburg (1920-1922), and finally Czechoslovak ambassador to Hungary (1922-1926) and Austria (1926-1932).

He maintained contacts with Tomas Bata as a publicist and advisor from the spring of 1906 at the latest. On 7 June 1932 he joined the Bata concern as a director. This was only a month before Bata's unexpected death in a plane crash over Otrokovice. After Bata's death, he accepted a position as a member of the three-member concern directorate alongside Jan Antonín Bata and Dominik Čipera. In the 1930s, he served on the boards of the Union of Czechoslovak Industry (1932) and the Economic Headquarters for Central Europe (1936). He worked for transport projects that removed transport barriers between the western and eastern halves of the country. In 1938 he was appointed to the position of Czechoslovak general commissioner for the World Exhibition in New York (1938). On 16 September 1938 he was appointed minister of propaganda in the government of Milan Hoxha, and in the subsequent Syr government he served as minister without portfolio (for propaganda) until 1 December 1938.

During the occupation he was a member of the closest management of the Bata concern, a. s., Zlín, in the Protectorate. From this position, he was instrumental in the implementation and development of the factory town in Zruč nad Sázavou - Bata. He participated in the fateful negotiations with the Cologne Oberlandrat Herbert Eugen Eckholdt (13 March 1941), which decided to maintain the project of the Bata factory town in Posázaví. During the war he especially supported the development of Bata's specialised education at the level of closed universities. His son Ivan followed him to Zlín during the occupation, and his grandfather was regularly visited in Zlín by his grandsons Václav (1936-2011) and Ivan Miloš Havel (1939-2021).

The imposition of the national administration on the Bata concern in May 1945 and its nationalisation in October of the same year were the precursors of Vavreček's dismissal from his post and his departure from the company's services at the beginning of 1946. The post-war period was a bitter end to Vavreck's life. He was first indicted, tried and finally acquitted for alleged collaboration with the Nazis. After February 1948, however, he was again prosecuted until he was sentenced to three years in a heavy prison on the basis of fabricated evidence on 22 December 1948. While he was spared prison by the intervention of Klement Gottwald, he was not spared confiscation of his property. He spent the last days of his life in his daughter's Prague apartment, and died in a Brno hospital. Vavrečka was an avid collector of Moravian folk pottery and an occasional writer. His detective novel František Leliček in the Service of Sherlock Holmes (1908) was even made into a film.