PREHISTORY (1986 - 1992)
Once upon a time, back in the days of large black LPs and unshaven armpits, a young man and woman created a small tailor shop in the kitchen of a country house and started making down jackets and sleeping bags. Why? Because they simply didn’t have the equipment they needed when they were out hiking, climbing, canoeing, picking mushrooms and going for walks. They soon started equipping their equally deprived friends, friends of friends, and friends of friends of friends…
They had no idea that this would one day become a company with everything that entails. That was the era of the Bolsheviks and so they had no idea what running a company would involve, nor did they have any reason to consider it. On the contrary, back then work was mainly considered a formal necessity in order to retain your relative freedom, and so they both had plenty of time to enjoy their hobbies to the fullest (this was probably the last time they could ever indulge in them so intensely). When Bolshevism then disappeared with the wave of a velvet wand, nothing seemed more obvious than to turn this home production into an official business.
And so overnight, the young man and woman became capitalists. They still sat at their sewing machines, or in the filling plant, which consisted of a tent put up in the middle of the room, but now it was ‘for real’. Their lives, and soon after also the lives of their employees, depended fully on how well they worked and how useful they were for their clients – in those days it was a completely new feeling, one of dizzying freedom and unprecedented responsibility.
The rest is history, so to speak. Nowadays though, things move faster (about a million times faster) and are more dramatic, often containing elements of action, affection, or horror. Both the viewers and the actors sometimes cover their eyes and grab hold of their hat or beanie, some of them even throw up, but there’s no stopping it. Innovations, changes, major decisions and events now occur within a matter of days or even hours.
In 1990, we needed a name for the products that were so rapidly growing in number. We needed a ‘label’ like all experienced foreign companies have. That’s how the logo and name Warmpeace came to be – a word that cannot be found in any dictionary, yet it captures exactly what the company gives its customers – warmth and peace. Many years later an explanatory slogan was invented: ‘WARM on the body – PEACE in the soul’.
In the spring of 1991, Warmpeace opened its first office in Prague and, in the autumn of that same year, a small factory in the town of Červený Kostelec. Within a year, this young man and woman became employers, shift supervisors, designers, engineers, repairmen for the mechanics, masons and handymen during the renovations, cleaners, drivers of the borrowed Škoda 120 that for a long time was the company’s only car and knew no limits, material purchasers, accountants, bookkeepers, product salesmen, stock handlers, packers, and last but not least, managers.
Looking back at it now, I have no idea how we managed it all, but by running at full speed and with enough enthusiasm, we somehow did. Of course, there were growing pains. We made plenty of mistakes, had our doubts and were constantly searching and improving, but it was the most wonderful, and also the most difficult, time of our lives.