Gammo stories: the beginnings

2024. 02. 29.

We were sitting in the van borrowed from my cousin on the way to Nyíregyháza and my colleague and I were just talking about the havoc two Great Danes can wreak in the back seat row, when my phone rang.. 

Robi called, to whom we had just taken his blast chiller ordered at a bargain price. He wasn't sure if he needed this machine at all, in fact, he did, but only if he could negotiate free shipping into the purchase price. We were half an hour away from Nyíregyháza, he must have chosen the perfect time to discuss this.

Classic game theory situation: do I accept the small or the big loss? I didn't want to take the machine back to the warehouse, in fact, I couldn't have done it, the payment day came, I had no choice but to go into the bargain, deliver it, take the money and then get angry on the way home.

We are in 2008. Those who were involved in the trade of catering machinery in Hungary at that time worked in roughly the same way as us, at most with a larger number of employees and a more secure financial background. Survey, proposal preparation, purchase price negotiation, and finally delivery, again and again. Cooking demonstrations, a fight with the competition's always lower offers, a lot of costs and less and less profit on sales.

After this incident, I decided to create Hungary's first online store for the catering industry. At the time, this was considered unique, despite the fact that we and our competitors already had a website, on which many people displayed product data sheets and catalogs. But only without a price, saying that separate consultation with each customer is required.

So we created the nagykonyhaigépek.hu website, on which we first uploaded approx. a hundred, then 500, and later thousands of products with pictures, detailed technical parameters, and most importantly: with a price. If the visitors liked the product and accepted the price, they could place their order with a few clicks - even on weekends or in the middle of the night!

There was an uproar in the market! I was also asked how I thought I could simply list the price of a product in hundreds of thousands of forints, just as if it were a CD or book worth a few thousand forints! (At that time, these were the hit articles of online stores.) My answer then was the same as it is now: if a customer can find all the information about a product on the website that we would tell them orally or through a salesperson, then why not make it public that all customer to find out when and how they want?

It all sounds funny now, but 15 years ago it was a revolutionary act, and I've been proud of it ever since. Our business strategy has not changed since then: we sell kitchen appliances and tools of excellent quality that help our customers' work at affordable prices, via the Internet. Our team, which has grown to 17 people over the years, works every single day to provide our customers with full support at every stage, from order to delivery, from purchase to the end of the product's lifetime. Today, not only in Hungary, but from Germany to Bulgaria, everywhere with native-speaking customer service.