From golf to dough: Czech bakery chain William Thomas hits 80m crowns

Vilém Raček and Tomáš Kadlec were once professional golfers, and later worked as golf coaches. Today they run one of Moravia's most prominent artisan bakeries — William Thomas Artisan Bakery, which over a decade has grown from a garage project into a chain of seven bakeries with annual revenue of about 80 million crowns.

The two friends met as teenagers at golf lessons and took the sport to a professional level, later even working as coaches. They knew almost nothing about baking when they decided to try their hand at the new venture. The first batches of dough were made in the garage of their parents' house, and the finished products were initially sold straight out of an office.

Soon a small bakery window opened in Brno's Mozolky district, and queues quickly formed. That became the starting point for a business that over a decade grew into six bakeries in Brno and one in Prague, opened four years ago. The latest location launched in Královo Pole in early summer, and the near-term plans include another opening in Prague.

“We're not following some multi-year plan where we expect to have ten bakeries in fifteen years. We just take advantage of opportunities as they come up, and respond to how our existing locations are hitting the ceiling of their capacity,” explains Kadlec, who trained as a specialist in international relations.

Raček, who has a background in pharmacy, together with his partner oriented the bakery toward French traditions from the very start — hence the internationally sounding brand name. “We just like croissants and French bread, so we decided to give it a try. And what came out of it turned into a pleasant swim through unexpected waters for us,” he says.

The bakery's signature product became the so-called “kroláče” — a combination of crispy French pastry dough with typically Czech fillings: poppy seed, curd cheese and apple. Other bestsellers include the chocolate croissant and the pain de campagne country loaf, and at one point the founders' toast bread also enjoyed cult status.

Today Raček and Kadlec's role has changed: from bakers they've turned into process coordinators. “Right now our main focus is making sure everything runs the way it should, and we keep refining our recipes. I don't think there's a single recipe where we've said to ourselves, that's it, done, we won't touch it anymore,” the entrepreneurs note.

The bakeries' efficiency is supported by their own in-house system, which tracks not only inventory but also tells them when to mix a particular dough so they bake the right amount of product each day, and reminds them when the sourdough starter needs feeding.