CZECHS WANT TO SET UP BOOT AND SHOE FACTORY IN NEW ZEALAND

Wanganui Chronicle, 3 October 1947, Page 6

CZECHS WANT TO SET UP BOOT AND SHOE FACTORY IN NEW ZEALAND

(P.A.) Wellington, Oct. 2. To establish a modern shoe factory, using mainly New Zealand operatives and producing boots and shoes particularly designed to meet New Zealand ideas and fashions, is the hope and aim of Dr. Fred A. Mendliks representative in Wellington of the British Bata Shoe Company, on whose behalf an application for a permit to establish a factory was filed early this year and is under consideration by the Bureau of Industry. Dr Menchik is a Czech, who, after existing through the war years under Nazi occupation, went to Britain to join the English Bata Company, one of 50 or so factories established through the world as links of the parent Czecnoslovakian company of Thomas Bata, at Zlin. Everything was dependent on the bureau's decision, he said. Dr. Menchick added that if the factory were established it would certainly not be in one of the main centres. It was a policy of the orgrnanisation to set up its plants on a suitable site near to n smaller centre of population, close to a town of 8000 to 10,000 inhabitants, where there would be opportunity to build homes for operatives with all the necessary, facilities for a community which would grow up round the factory.

Dr. Menchik expressed a go,od opinion of the quality of the greatest proportion of boots and shoes at present made in New Zealand. He had found Unit New Zealand people had their own ideas of boot and shoe fashions, ideas which were hard lo meet with products imported from factories in other countries. They were best met, he said, by producing special types in I lie country, just ns h a( l been done in other countries where the companies' I'actories had been established.