Retail Beyond Borders: How Bata Shoes Unlocked Frontier Markets | BoF CROSSROADS 2025

Bata, the Swiss-based multinational footwear manufacturer and retailer founded in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (modern-day Czech Republic), has been around for more than 130 years.

The company has had a global presence since almost the very beginning. Today it has thousands of stores across five continents and sells around 150 million pairs of shoes a year. It’s so enmeshed in many of the frontier markets where it operates that many of its customers don’t even know it’s a global business.

In a conversation with BoF president Nick Blunden, Bata’s chief digital and international franchise officer Roger Graell unpacked the brand’s “global-local” strategy.

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ABOUT THE BUSINESS OF FASHION: The Business of Fashion is a next-generation fashion media company conceived for today’s global and hyper-connected world. Founded in 2007 by Imran Amed, BoF is known for its authoritative, agenda-setting point of view on the global fashion industry, and is an indispensable resource for fashion executives, creatives, students, and entrepreneurs in over 200 countries. It has been described as “The Economist of Fashion,” “A Daily Destination for Fashion’s Power Players”, and “The Industry Bible”, www.businessoffashion.com