Jan (Karel) Antonín Bata was born in Uherské Hradiště to Ludmila and Antonín Bata. Jan's father and his siblings from his father's first marriage, Anna, Antonín and Tomáš, were shoemakers. Antonín Bat'a the elder in his home shoemaker's workshop in Uherské Hradiště and his siblings Anna, Antonín the younger and Tomáš in Zlín from 1894. Jan Antonín was therefore in close contact with the shoemaking industry from childhood. After completing his compulsory schooling, he started his apprenticeship at the age of 14 in his brother's Zlín factory, where he received his apprenticeship certificate in 1913. Jan Antonín gained professional experience in factories in Germany before World War I and in the USA after the war, where he was the head of a small Bata factory in Lynn, Massachusetts, from 1919 to 1920. After a brief stint as a salesman in a London Bata store, military service, and marriage to the daughter of a Zlín city doctor, Maria Gerbec (1902-1987, married 1921), he returned to his brother's Zlín business. Between 1922 and 1927 he worked in a number of managerial positions. A personal falling out with his authoritarian and basically a generation older brother Tomas in 1927 was the only time in his career when he temporarily worked outside the Bata family business.

In 1931, the Bata family company was transformed into a joint-stock company with private shares. Tomáš Baťa became the chairman of the board of directors, while Jan Antonín Baťa took his seat in the management of the company without strictly defining his competences. Jan's situation changed radically with the death of Tomáš († 12 July 1932). According to his will, Jan Antonín was to pay off his family members, pay inheritance tax to the state and become the main shareholder of the Bata, a. s., Zlín concern. In his brother's intentions and together with Tomáš's closest associates Josef Hlavnička and Ing. Hugo Vavrečka, he successfully developed the Group's policy and strategies, especially the engineering and construction programme. He travelled by air through Europe, Africa, Asia and America (1937) and was awarded an honorary doctorate of technical sciences from the Dr. Edvard Beneš University of Technology in Brno (1938). In the second half of the 1930s, his activities were increasingly confronted with current political developments, whether we are referring to his involvement in the Sudeten German question, his debated presidential candidacy in 1938 or his opposition to President Beneš and criticism of the policies of the Second Republic.

In May 1939, Jan Antonín Bata and his family left for the USA and then for Brazil (1940). His pre-war sympathies for the Czech right, his arrest by the Gestapo during the seizure of the Sudetenland in mid-November 1938, his personal meeting with Hermann Göring and his cautious attitude towards Beneš's exile policy complicated Bata's post-war position. In May 1947, he was sentenced in absentia to 15 years in prison, loss of civil rights and confiscation of all Czechoslovak property. In his post-war activities and in a 20-year series of court cases with his son Tomáš Jan (1914-2008), Jan Antonín's registration on the Allied blacklists (from 1940) disqualified him. The former shoe king was stripped of all his assets outside Brazil, where he had established several companies and even entire agro-industrial estates. Jan Antonín Bata was also active in literature. His bibliography includes many newspaper articles, theoretical and programmatic writings, and books, including an extensive memoir published from his estate. His not very convincing attempts in the field of poetry are also preserved in the family of Jan's heirs. Jan Antonín Bata died on 23 August 1965 in São Paulo. He was not rehabilitated until the turn of the millennium. His family union with his wife Maria produced five children.

During his lifetime, the name of Jan Antonín Bata became a symbol of publicly experienced entrepreneurial success. However, it was also the subject of petty disputes about its importance in shaping the Bata system, concern and family politics. He came to the head of the concern at a time when the Bata system was already largely formed. Nevertheless, Jan Antonín cannot be denied a major influence on the creation of new production programmes, marketing strategies and media representation. The Group's activities in the field of art (Zlín Salons of Contemporary Art 1936-1940), modern media (Zlín Film Studios at Kudlova, 1936) or civil engineering (Otrokovice-Batau) are unimaginable without his personal involvement. He emphasised the development of professional education, which was reflected in the projects of the Bata School of Art (1939) and the unrealised plan for a Zlín university to replace the traditional role of domestic academic institutions during the Protectorate years of closure of Czech universities. Not to be overlooked are his activities in the field of his enormous interest in corporate urbanism and architecture, whether materialized in the many sub-projects in the field of corporate infrastructure or in the corporate writings Building a State for 40,000,000 [people] (1937) and The Industrial City (1939). He continued to develop Bata's urban planning principles in Brazil, where his colonial ambitions were fulfilled in the establishment of ten agro-industrial settlements.

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