Tomáš Petr builds LPP's Czech fashion empire of top brands

While shoppers in Czech malls routinely walk into Reserved, Cropp, House, Mohito or Sinsay, few realize that all these brands belong to a single Polish company — LPP. It is the Czech Tomáš Petr, the group's country manager, who makes sure this business in Czechia keeps growing at double-digit rates and stays profitable even amid rapid expansion.

The numbers are striking: between 2020 and 2024, LPP's revenue in Czechia grew from 2.2 to 7.5 billion crowns. Petr, who is 42, oversees a network of more than 230 stores and over 1,500 employees — one of the largest players in the Czech fashion retail market by that measure. He landed the job, by his own admission, “through job ads” — an ordinary job search rather than a career built inside the company since his youth.

LPP was founded back in 1991 in Gdańsk by entrepreneur Marek Piechocki. Today the group operates in 47 markets — from London to Tashkent — trades on the Warsaw Stock Exchange, is part of the WIG20 index of Poland's largest companies, and has a market capitalization of around 220 billion crowns. The company entered Czechia in 2003, opening its first Reserved store in Brno's Olympia mall, and since then the Czech division has become the group's fourth-largest export market — after Poland, Ukraine and Romania.

According to Petr, the Czech market for Reserved, House, Mohito and Cropp is already close to saturated — the company is focused on optimizing its existing stores. The main bet for growth, however, is on the Sinsay brand, which was originally aimed at teenage girls' clothing but, after a 2019 rebrand, expanded into menswear, children's wear, home goods, toys and garden products. Today up to 40% of Sinsay's sales come from non-clothing categories.

“Our long-term ambition is for Sinsay to become the number one choice for non-grocery shopping,” Petr says. Unlike the group's other brands, which cluster in large shopping centers in big cities, Sinsay is moving into smaller regional towns with around 10,000 residents, following the local boom in retail parks — some 15–20 of which open in Czechia every year.

Petr estimates the Czech market's potential at more than 200 Sinsay stores, and that is the figure the team is now working toward. Online sales also play an important role in the business: they already bring in about a quarter of revenue — nearly 1.9 billion crowns a year across the group's five brands.