Tomáš Bat'a was born into a family with a tradition of shoemaking dating back to at least the 17th century. His mother's early death, his father's second marriage, a move to the unfamiliar Uherské Hradiště and the foreignness of his German-speaking environment led him to a secure knowledge of the shoemaking trade and a deep affection for self-study. In 1894, together with his siblings Anna (1872-1936) and Antonín (1874-1908), he founded a shoemaking factory in his native Zlín from his father's share of his mother's inheritance, which repeatedly hovered over the precipice before 1900, when the first factory building was erected in Zlín near the railway station. The public company T. & A. Bat'a prospered by producing cheap, lightweight canvas shoes, the so-called Bat'a shoes, for the production of which Tomáš set up a machine shop in 1903, the basis of the future Bat'a machine shops. Foreign experience from factories in England, Germany (1905) and the USA (1905, 1919) and the takeover of the company after his brother's death put Tomáš at the head of the factory, which in 1910 employed approximately 350 employees with a daily production of 3,400 pairs of shoes. Before World War I, Bata married the daughter of Dr. František Menčík, director of the Vienna Court Library, who gave birth to his heir, his only son Tomáš Jan (1914-2008), two years later.

Large-scale errands during the years of World War I put the factory at the forefront of Austro-Hungarian shoe production (in 1917 Bata employed about 4,000 workers). The post-war consumer crisis and the inspiration of American Fordism led the company, through consistent rationalisation measures, to the forefront of the Czechoslovak shoe industry and in 1928, for the first time, to the forefront of world shoe exports. It was not until 1923, when T. Bata became mayor of Zlín, that he definitively linked the company's fate with the city of Zlín, which quickly turned into an exemplary example of a factory town run by the company, a showcase of Czechoslovak architectural modernism and a laboratory of Fordist industry. The building of an extensive network of company stores with a system of comprehensive customer care, the continuous modernisation of technology, management, marketing and personnel, and the decision to defy the Great Depression by exporting capital and technology beyond Czechoslovak borders to build subsidiaries producing Bata products within national markets as home products not subject to customs barriers were undoubtedly primarily Bata's work.

The affinity for modern technology, machinery and means of transport, led by the aircraft he used to undertake his legendary promotional Indian mission to new markets (1931), became synonymous with corporate dynamism and modernity. However, his affection for airplanes proved fatal for the captain of interwar Czechoslovak industry - T. Bata died in a plane crash over Otrokovice on his way to the Swiss Bata production centre in Möhlin (Aargau) in the morning fog on 12 July 1932.

During his lifetime, the name of T. Bata became a symbol of entrepreneurial ambition on the one hand, but also of a tough business system on the other. During the years of Czechoslovak state socialism (1948-1989), the name Bata was one of the most demonised names, synonymous with the ruthless capitalist exploitation of the working class. And even after the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the name of T. Bata did not cease to be ideologically declaimed, mostly as an idealized symbol of the "golden times" of the interwar Czechoslovak Republic, as an icon of the past and expected future successes of the Czech economy. The latest glorifications and hagiographic descriptions of Bata's life are, however, paradoxically also the result of the absence of a modern biography of Bata, which would critically map the entrepreneur's life and definitively free him from the snares of the journalistic texts of the 1920s and 1930s, created in the spirit of the corporate narrative.

Zruč nad Sázavou entered the field of vision of Bata's management in 1930 at the latest, when the company's shoe shop was opened there. Although Tomáš Baťa probably never visited Zruč itself, it was Baťa who, in the early 1930s, turned his attention to Posázaví, and more specifically to Žďár nad Sázavou and the local shoemakers and shoe factories. Žďár nad Sázavou had been an important centre of the shoe industry in the Czech lands since the end of the 19th century, which was deeply shaken by the effects of the Great Depression. T. Bat'a intended to use the unemployed skilled labour force to build his own company, but a wave of criticism arose from local communist politicians and their shoemaker constituents. In the end, another plan in the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands won out over the Žďár project - the building of a factory town in Třebíč-Borovina. Bata and his successors at least remained in correspondence with the local factory owner František Kyncl, who was offered generous help in the form of a loan of CZK 100,000 in the crisis year 1931.