Our history

The whole story started around at the beginning of 1993 in the VIIth district of Budapest in Murányi street. I was around 20 and I wanted to change my old Trabant pretty much so I rented a 40sqm shop where I could store several bikes and could do some preparing but most of the bikes what I imported as ready bikes from Italy were stored in the attic of our house which was upgraded so to be the official warehouse of my company.

In 1994 I was importing spareparts already and rented a 20 times bigger place
.
It was time to change the personal company to an Ltd in 1996 when the income became already too big to stay small. These years our biggest cusomers were big stores and though our present business politics are totally different, these years were very important to get strong and financially stable and we could grow very quickly.

We entered the international stage in 1998 when we exhibited in Cologne. Since then we exhibit on 2-3 national and international exhibitions yearly. We develop continuously our assembling technology as well as our logistical background.
Olimpia Ltd bought Gepida brandname which has been on the market since 1990 and had a wellknown and very good name and reputation.
We passed the ISO 9002 test first among the East-European countries this year.
This was already showing us the new direction so that we change from big quantities to good quality. We started to produce less bikes but with much better quality.
The same year we moved to the XVIth district where we have our headquarter since then.
We built our own sales network. In several countries we work with our own representatives in others we work with local wholesalers, so most of the bikes are delivered to the stores directly from the factory.
Year 2004 and 2005 was the year of the quality development and making the brand stronger.
We delivered better and better bikes for our customers who were 80% foreign customers already. One could see Gepida bikes on the streets of several countries all over Europe such as, Netherlands, Belgium, Croatia, Germany, Sweden, Austria, Luxemburg, Russia, Serbia, Finnland, Slovakia, Romania.
In 2004 when we entered the EU we had to face with much bigger concurence so we had to focus on the sales and build up a very stong strategy in order to stay alive long term.
From 2006 because of the reasons above, with all our efforts we started several special developments focusing on a pedelec development.
In 2008 we came to the market with our first serious electric bike which brought several new countries again to our customer portfolio. That is why one can see Gepida bikes in France, Swiss and England. Gepida brand became more and more wellknown and appreciated Europewide.
In year 2009 despite of the difficult financial situation wordwide the comapany was continuing to grow thank to the good planning and of course a big piece of luck. Firts time this year we were exhibiting in Thaipei. There are several new countries among our customers, we are planning with outside of Europe long term but about this I hope I will have a chance to talk about in year 2010.

György Berkes - executive