The city of Vukovar has had plenty of international press in recent years relating to the tragedy of its fate during the regional conflict in the 1990s. A happier story - and a successful one - features in the New York Times on October 21, 2016.
“You couldn’t buy Coca-Cola, but you could buy a bottle of Cockta, which is from Slovenia, and which I still love,” says the Croatian-American entrepreneur Robert Grgurev, recalling his childhood in the former Yugoslavia. Similarly, circa 1976, in lieu of Western sneakers like Converse and Superga, Croatia introduced Startas. The state-owned table-tennis footwear brand sponsored the 1987 World University Games in Zagreb; according to Grgurev, who is now the brand’s US-based president, “Every cool older kid or college student had at least one pair.” That is, until the 1990s, when production came to a brutal halt during Croatia’s war of independence, in which the one-industry town of Vukovar — home of the company’s headquarters — was ground zero.
