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Grand Rapids Business Journal
Czech-born shoemaker grows work boot company Liberty Footwear into bustling business.
Courtesy Liberty Footwear
Over two decades after immigrating to the U.S., the son of a Czech cobbler is finding success growing his own shoemaking business in Grand Rapids.
Petr Kovarik is owner and founder of Liberty Footwear, at 1750 Alpine Ave. NW in Grand Rapids, located in an industrial park north of Grand Rapids Foam Technologies and south of Crystal Flash.
The son of a cobbler from a small village in the former Czechoslovakia, at what is now the border of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Kovarik studied shoemaking in high school and college. At the time, Czechoslovakia was part of the Eastern Bloc of Communist countries, and its biggest export was shoes to the Soviet Union, making about 160 million pairs a year, with other Warsaw Pact countries such as Poland contributing farming equipment and cosmetics for the empire, while the U.S.S.R. concentrated on prod