Jan Nehera
| Jan Nehera | |
|---|---|
| Born |
December 31, 1899 Kostelec na Hané, Czech Republic |
| Died | April 4, 1958 (aged 58) Casablanca, Morocco |
| Nationality | Czechoslovak Republic |
Jan Nehera (December 31, 1899 – April 4, 1958) was a Czechoslovak businessman. With his pioneering approach to retail trade and advanced manufacturing methods he was able to make his way on three continents where, from 1931 to 1939, he was progressively developing a network of more than 130 retail shops of large capacity and several tens of business representations and plants. He was the first to vertically integrate the sale of ready-made clothing from the manufacturing process to retail, and thus he showed the way to current luxury houses such as Chanel and Hermes. He implemented many innovative approaches into practice which were also used by Ford or Bata. His products were at the top of the textile tradition in the Czechoslovak Republic which had begun in 1858 with the first plant for ready-made clothing in Europe built right in Nehera’s hometown of Prostějov. This tradition is still alive in many garment factories in Prostějov or Trenčín.
After Nehera had finished his formation to become a locksmith and completed his basic military training, in 1923, with the help of his father and two partners he established his first factory carrying the name Nehera a spol. After several years, both the father and son left the factory in order to establish their own family business. They were producing men’s and children’s ready-made clothes which they supplied to traders. In its beginnings, the business located in Prostějov had 9 permanent employees and 50 tailors working at home.
Around 1929, Nehera started contemplating the sale of ready-made clothes in his own stores. He was inspired by Bata’s style of doing business and also borrowed his idea of prices ending in nines. The opening of his first independent store in Prague at Wenceslas Square in 1931 was accompanied by an extensive advertising campaign with the slogan “directly from the manufacturer to the consumer”. The campaign reached people so well that, according to the archives, the turnover in the first stores climbed to 100,000 Czechoslovak korunas a day. The opening of own stores gave him the opportunity for selling directly to customers. Nehera was one of the few businessmen who managed not only to flourish at the beginning of the 1930s during the economic crisis, but he even extended the scope of his services. This was so mainly thanks to the full vertical integration of the whole logistic chain, from the production of ready-made clothes to their retail selling, in own factories and own stores.
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