Peter Kozina

In memoriam

Peter Kozina * 19 Jan 1876 + 21 Feb 1930 Ustanoviteej Toverne Peko

"If I decide to build it is going to be the most modern enterprise!" Peter Kozina. Peter Kozina was born in Dolenja vas, Ribnica in 1876. He was a Slovenian merchant and entrepreneur, the pioneer of Slovenian shoemaking industry. In 1896 he was employed for the first time in Anton Krisper's shop, where he was in charge of a footwear department. In that time, he had access to information about suppliers, shoemakers from Tržič town area, production and sales in the transition from the 19th to the 20th century. With his associate he went and established Hitzl & Kozina. Their first company produced shoes, straw hats, toothpicks and combs, and they were sold all over Austro – Hungarian Empire. In 1906 he organized a small shoemaking workshop in Tržič. Around 1910, despite the hard competition from the Germans, he established the first Slovenian production and distribution business, Peter Kozina & Co for industrial shoemaking with its headquarters in Ljubljana. Kozina's general idea was to lift the shoemaking industry in Upper Carniola region to a higher level, attract workers from family workshops and offer them jobs with organized work time, organized and clean premises, social security, and for them to have the access to a modern technology in industrial shoemaking. He established the trademark Peko (the name is derived from his initials Pe(ter) Ko(zina). In the 1920's Kozina became a recognised and respectable Slovenian enterpreneur and a member of several important Slovenian economic institutions. In Ljubljana he bought the former Zois manor and refitted it entirely. In Tržič he expanded the factory building, he built a dwelling house for the masters and apprentices in Pristava, further on he established the commercial network of footwear shops branded Peko all over the territory of the first Yugoslavia. He also cooperated with the craft and city school in Tržič, supported many associations and several Slovene artists. People from Ljubljana and Tržič remembered him as a refined gentelman, always dressed after the latest fashion, a person who generously cared for the reputation of his business. His virtues were perseverance, strong will, diligence and social sense. His business success started to decline in the second half of the 1920s as a result of broader social reasons, like a battle with the merciless capitalist competition, national economic policy, problems with the employees, and insufficient capital. In 1930 he died suddenly. In the 1930's the company Peter Kozina & Co. changed quite few owners. The company was deleted from the Court Registry during the process of nationalisation in 1948. Thereafter the production of shoes continued in the original building under the socialist company Triglav.

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