This May I had an opportunity to visit beautiful Hungary with my family, and to meet some amazing people from Julius-K9 company. This was an amazing experience, and a lot of the things amazed me, so at one point I decided to write a blog post about my visit there. I want to thank people from Julius-K9 for showing me every part of the company, explaining processes, and being an amazing host for my stay there.
They even showed us (with the tour guide speaking my language) all of the amazing things in Budapest!
I hope you will enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed seeing how the biggest European harness manufacturer does things “under the hood”.
Few things about this post
As some of you know, I run one of the biggest K9 niche pages on Instagram: @k9insta, and recently I decided to start writing here on this blog. After an amazing experience in Hungary, I wanted to write a blog post about my stay there.
Disclaimer: This blog post is not a paid promotion. It is in every way my opinion and my experience about my visit and my stay there.
They like dogs! Really, really like them!
The first thing I noticed, and for me, it was the most important thing I noticed there, these people like dogs. Not in a way they use it for some kind of promotion, because they don’t do that. They, and by “they” I mean every employee, adore dogs. They literally live and enjoy every day with them. Julius-K9 company is not just a dog-friendly place, where you can bring your dog to work, it’s more than that. The company has its dog shelter, and a lot of the dogs from there went to good families. How many companies do you know run adoption centers? That was an amazing fact I didn’t know before coming there.
Btw, Ison, the boss in one of the offices, was here to meet us! And Ellie was with us on the whole tour through company offices. 🐕 She is some kind of a superstar there. Adopted girl, bossing, running, and sometimes cuddling around. 🥰
In the headquarters, they have two adopted dogs with the best lawn ever! 🥰They run around, bark, enjoy food, and live the best life ever. Dogs in their offices make the whole environment so warm and friendly, that you just can’t be stressed when a dog runs up to you while you work.
Company history
The headquarters are located in the Szigetszentmiklós, a small, quiet, and beautiful city near Budapest, or around 25 km from it. Julius-K9 started as a small family-run company, founded by Gyula “Julius” Sebő in 1997. And the whole story started exactly in that city, Szigetszentmiklós, in one of the garages. As the company started growing, it needed more space, so it extended its locations step by step. Now, in Szigetszentmiklós, the company uses four different locations for different company needs.
Marketing and sales in one space, headquarters, finance, warehouse, etc in other, IDC Longwalk harness production in the third, and product development in the fourth space. But, that’s not all.
The company recently had an expansion of the big factory in the city of Tiszafüred, where most of the production is done. This production plant was opened seven years ago, but a few months ago they added a new 5,000 square meter site to the plant in Tiszafüred, while also adding new employees.
This time, I didn’t visit that part of the company, but from the photos, videos, and stories of employees, there is an amazing job done there with hundreds of hard-working employees.
The whole story is more than interesting because from the way the company’s need for space extended, you can see how long and hard was that road, and how many challenges they overcame to be where they are now.
Attention to details
What amazed me the most, was the attention to detail in every part of the work they do. By the way, that was the first thing I noticed when I started working with people from Julius-K9. To satisfy the customer needs, they think thoroughly about every part of the customer experience journey. Whether it’s their physical product or their communication with customers or business partners, they notice, check, and adapt every part of it.
Even though they have a modern and automated production line, with automated machines, before they ship any product, they check every part of it manually. There are persons in the company who check every harness (or other product): every part of the harness must work properly, every part must be sewen with the highest standard, colors must match the designed colors, it must be perfectly clean before it’s packaged, etc. If it’s not, it’s returned to the production line so it’s fixed (if it can be fixed).
Besides using the highest quality materials, they also have the highest possible quality control.
In the two photos below, there is a part of the team that checks every product before shipping.
Some cool and random facts about Julius-K9
- Employees enjoy nice working conditions. They have a massage room they can use during the day, teams, where that is possible, can work from home, and they have their gym and other spaces where they can relax. How cool is that?
- The company was founded in 1997, and it will celebrate its 25 years of existence in the next few months.
- They expanded their sales to the USA, so they have also USA headquarters.
- They have Amazon stores, with a great number of satisfied Amazon buyers.
- In the warehouse, they have very intelligent and smart shelves to optimize the space. When the shelves are filled with orders, they completely close down and move to the end of the space, so they have more room for new orders and new things.
- They care about dogs, so they opened a dog shelter years ago, and they plan to focus more and more on the adopted dogs.
- They try to reuse the parts of raw materials or packaging for their production needs, so the whole process can be more environmentally friendly. For example, parts of packaging they don’t need, they use for their internal storage needs. They also try to optimize the storage space as much as possible, with some intelligent self-moving shelves when they are full.
Proud of Hungarian roots
The thing I really liked in Hungary, and later in Julius-K9 company is the way people are proud of their Hungarian roots. The whole Budapest is very well historically preserved, the Heroes’ Square for example showing the important kings, and noble people from Hungarian history. In the same way, you can see that in Julius-K9 company. In the headquarters, you can see paintings that portray important people from the History of Hungary. And the history of their people wasn’t always easy, they worked hard to preserve and build the Hungary we see today, so it was a very nice moment for me to see how much people there appreciate that.
In the photos you can see a few paintings from their offices.
Something for the end of this story
We really enjoyed staying in Hungary and visiting the Julius-K9 people. We even got the toys as a present for kids! 🙂
For the end, few photos of beautiful Hungary.
Thank you all for reading!
