How Czech entrepreneur built the two-billion-crown Albi empire

Antonín Kokeš started out as a student selling postcards on Prague's Old Town Square. Today he owns Albi, a company with an annual turnover of almost two billion crowns, the Antonínovo pekařství bakery chain, and the fashion brand Kinoko. The entrepreneur told the story of his more than thirty-year journey on the Money Maker podcast.

It all began without any business plan: together with a fellow student, Jaromír Kovařík, Kokeš decided to sell postcards — and put the idea into practice the very next day. When the tourist season ended and demand from foreigners dried up with it, the partners turned to Czechs and Christmas, creating “old Czech” postcards based on pre-war designs found in antique shops. According to Kokeš, this was the first product that was genuinely “their own”; before that, the company had simply resold other people's goods.

Over time, the postcard business grew into Albi, a well-known board game maker whose hit product “Magic Reading” (Kouzelné čtení) helped the company gain a foothold in the Polish market. That expansion wasn't easy: for years the team discussed closing the Polish branch, since many competitors had been burned in that market. But Kokeš refused to give up and waited for the moment when the business finally took off.

Today Albi is no longer run by its founder but by professional management, although Kokeš remains the company's sole owner and still regularly talks with staff at every level, not just top management. He admits that being a business owner isn't always straightforwardly useful. “Sometimes the owner is a brake,” he says. “There are people who understand the business better and have more energy than you do. Suppressing your own ego and trusting them isn't easy.”

Missing new challenges, Kokeš launched the Antonínovo pekařství bakery chain after noticing that, unlike in Germany or France, it was almost impossible to find good bread in Prague — just “strange mush” from supermarkets. Big players with industrial production lines aren't interested in bread, while small ones struggle to organize production. According to the entrepreneur, bread has a special magic: people react to bakeries far more emotionally than to Albi's board games, even though the games remain his main venture.

At the same time, Kokeš is also developing the fashion brand Kinoko, admitting that so far the venture hasn't brought the success he had hoped for. But as his career — from postcards to bread — shows, patience and the ability not to give up remain his biggest assets in business.