8 years of Factory - Our great journey

It’s been 8 years since we were founded, long ago in 2012!

In this article, we’ll share this journey with you as we move along through our memories.

We’re extremely happy to reach this milestone and we’ll make sure that we continue down our path.

So, sit back and stroll through this hall of memories with us 🙂

Our journey starts in 2012

8 years ago, on a sunny Tuesday, Factory was born.

Our office was, well, it was a small apartment and there were less than 5 of us, including our CEO Ivica Horvat and our Creative Director Matej Sudar.

We’ve come a long way since then but bear with us for a few more years down the stroll.

Above, you can see one of the very first pictures ever taken in Factory. A small collective of young minds on a road to great success.

And here below, you can see how our first company website looked. It’s pretty much different than what it looks now.

We’ve learned a lot, both in domains of design and development and we applied that on our website.

We’ll do a fast forward do 2013, where things got pretty serious. 🙂

In 2013, our team continued to grow!

Our company expanded and in a short period of time, there were 9 of us!

Besides that, you may notice something’s different.

We moved to a new office!

As our numbers grew, it was necessary to move to a bigger office.

And after all these years, we’re still here – in the same office in Virovitica! 🙂

Now, let’s head over to 2014 and take a look at a few of our cherished moments.

We continued on the same road in 2014

Back in 2014, even though there weren’t a great number of us, we did have some sweet Factory t-shirts!

Today, our Factory t-shirts are so much different, but it’s always great to see some colleagues wearing those branded t-shirts. 🙂

Also, back in the days, when we didn’t yet deal with high-quality product management apps, we did it the old-school way.

Microsoft Excel, a whiteboard, and a marker were all we needed to make our projects work like a charm.

We were a small and ambitious team, but we did great things.

And we continued to do so in 2015.

The year 2015 set us on the right track

As we continued down the road, we found a lot of people sharing our values. And before we even knew it – our small team grew to be pretty big!

This year was pretty fun! We’ve celebrated a great number of birthdays – and there were so many birthday cakes.

From just 2 initial members, we’ve come a long way and boasted 18 members, somewhat a large family.

And as we mentioned cakes, here’s a few of them.

This is a reminder to us that we need more cakes in the office! 🙂

One of our main goals was always to educate and bring value to our community.

In 2015, we hosted a number of various workshops and lectures, and we’re still continuing to do so respectively.

Check out how it looked 5 years ago!

And now, let’s head over to 2016!

Factory expansion in 2016

The year 2016 marks the year when we expanded our operations and opened a new office in Osijek.

Check out the view from our first Osijek office!

And even though our view was great, a great portion of our time was directed to working hard (and smart) and successfully finishing all of our projects.

Also, our offices were the go-to places for many guests. These are some of our dearest guests! 🙂

Here, we had a chance to connect with our youngsters and talk more with them about what we’re doing here in Factory.

And after all of the hard work and effort that we’ve put in for the last 4 years, it was time for a celebration!

Let’s move on to the year 2017!

A quick look at the year 2017 

If you’ve visited our office in Osijek, you have definitely noticed this logo. 🙂

It’s been three years since it’s been a part of our office – and we’re keeping it!

And this meeting room in the picture above has seen countless meetings.

Many incredible ideas and projects originated in this meeting room – and they still do.

And it wouldn’t be cool if we there was no teambuilding – right? And indeed there was. Check out how it looked 3 years ago.

And after playing paintball, we gotta say – it’s more painful than finding a bug in your code. But still incredibly fun! 🙂

Some of our members became TV stars (as seen below) and some of them starred in their own shows on our YouTube channel!

Let’s take a look at 2018!

What happened in 2018

Our mission stays clear and strong in 2018. In that year alone, we’ve educated over 580 people interested in IT!

This was our strongest year when it comes to education – 37 workshops and lectures. Incredible satisfaction.

Let’s take a quick peek at some of our 2018 workshops!

We worked on many awesome projects and kept growing our numbers!

And just how many members did we have in 2018? You’ll see that in our teambuilding video. Hint: it’s way over 20! 

And here’s the video coverage of our teambuilding 2 years ago! Check it out – it was really a lot of fun.

We’re coming close to the present day, so let’s hurry up and check up on 2019!

Why 2019 is one of the most crucial years for us? 

Well, first of all, we had more great visitors to our offices! 🙂

We love having the opportunity to bring our expertise closer to these youngsters. We hope we inspired them for their future career, even if it’s too early to say.

Moreover, we were present at many events organized by the local universities.

Some even became TV stars for a day! 🙂

We had tons of fun through our lectures and workshops.

And believe us – there were many of them.

In 2019, we had a great number of interns in our offices.

And the program was (and still is) so good that we got awarded Zlatni Indeks for having the best student internships in Croatia!

It’s one of our favorite achievements so far and we’re set to improve our internship program beyond that.

Let’s quickly recap our internship program in 2019!

We even had a few interns from the USA!

All in all, we’re happy to have a chance to educate our interns and steer them in a great career direction.

We visited Varažidn and shared our knowledge with many students and colleagues. Take a look and see how much we have enjoyed visiting “Week of careers” on Faculty of Organization and Informatics.

But, why is 2019 one of our most crucial years for us?

Enter Pimcore! Some time ago, we came across Pimcore, a digital experience platform and we were thrilled to implement it in our company.

At that point, Factory has already reached many milestones and our numbers are clocking around 50!

To introduce Pimcore to our company, we organized Pimcore day in late 2019.

And is there a better place to find out more about Pimcore than Pimcore Partner conference?

After visiting it, we were ready to go full-scale.

It’s safe to say that Pimcore has reshaped our company and is still continuing to do so.

It’s a highly-advanced platform capable of doing just about anything.

Any eCommerce store, any online marketplace, or a portal website – Pimcore can handle it without any issues.

Despite all of that hard work, we never missed out on celebrating some holidays!

And let’s not forget our awesome teambuilding!

Here are a few pictures (check out the rest on our Facebook page!)

We’ve arrived in 2020, so let’s take a look at what’s going in Factory recently!

What’s happening in 2020? 

We can all agree that 2020 is definitely an unusual year.

Despite all of the aggravating circumstances, Factory stood strong and brought in many great victories.

While it was still possible, we had many offline lectures and workshops.

Also, it was at the beginning of the year when we started our first iOS academy!

It was an all-round education for the up-and-coming iOS developers and it went great.

We made sure our young iOS apprentices have all of the needed equipment and resources at their disposal, and they even had their own office! 🙂

Even when we switched to remote work, the iOS academy went on.

All of the lectures and workshops were held online and it’s safe to say that it ended successfully!

A few months ago, the whole company has switched to remote work.

It was a new challenge for us, but we’ve discovered that we can handle it better than we could imagine in the beginning.

With the strong guidance of our leadership, we’ve got everything in order very quickly and a great majority of our members were delighted by remote work.

Now, the remote work is deeply incorporated in our everyday work.

Simply said, you can work from wherever you want and whenever you want, as long as the work is being done.

Some of our members even decided to take their work to the beach! 🙂

And talking about the remote work, the iOS academy wasn’t the only education program we launched this year (and went remote with it)!

Not long after the iOS academy was finished, our Frontend academy started.

It’s the first complete and fully remote education program we’ve ever organized!

And it’s still going strong!

After all of the months our mentors and apprentices put in, it’s soon coming to an end in early September.

This is yet another milestone for us, marking the first remote education we’ve launched.

Also, our student internship program is still going smoothly.

Already, there were 5 remote student internships in Factory! Our HR team made sure that students still have all the opportunities to carve their future in the IT, despite the recent worldwide epidemiological situation.

They’ve been working diligently and they successfully completed our internship program – from the comfort of their homes! Great job!

Also, we’ve reached another milestone this year.

In early 2020, we’ve officially become the first Pimcore partner in Croatia!

This was one of the greatest milestones for Factory, and believe us – we’re not stopping here! 🙂

Along this great 8-year journey, we’ve won tons of awards!

We’ll show off for a moment and present some of them to you down below.

Most successful company in the Virovitica-podravina county in 2017

Three years ago, Factory was awarded by the Croatian Chamber of Commerce for being the most successful company in Virovitica-podravina county!

An incredible achievement. 🙂

Leading Croatian agency in 2018

Clutch, the leading B2B ratings and reviews platform, placed us as the leading Croatian agency in 2018!

There are a few more awards from Clutch in our collection, so be sure to check out our awards page.

Best student internships in Croatia in 2019

Most recently, we’ve been awarded with Zlatni Indeks for having the best student internship program in Croatia!

This is proof of all of our efforts we’ve put in shaping our country’s young minds into great IT specialists.

It’s one of our most favorite awards and it showed us that we’re going in the right direction. We’re not stopping here and we’ll do our best to provide our interns with the best possible education they can get.

Best mobile app finalist in 2020

In 2020, we were awarded by MIXX, a competition tailored following the international IAB license, for having one of the best mobile apps!

The Expecting app is one of the dearest projects we’ve worked on – be sure to check it out!

For a full list, please check our Awards page 🙂

We’ve hit another milestone this year!

Over the last 8 years, we’ve gathered our knowledge and we were keen on sharing it in our blog section.

Today, our blog section is home to 200 articles!

Along the journey, there were countless clients. We made sure that every client is as happy as it gets with our solution, and we think we did a pretty good job!

Check out some of our work and let us know your thoughts. 🙂

Throughout all those years, we’ve done pretty good work, we’ve made some life-long friendships and had tons of fun.

Here’s to these successful and awesome 8 years and many more to come! Cheers!

You’re looking to go down the IT career path? We’ve got some great news for you!

We’re always looking for new members! Check out our careers page and check out what’s waiting for when you become our colleague!

And if you’re a student looking for a place in our awarded student internship program – we got you!

You can apply anytime you want and we’ll make sure you get the best possible education.

We’re waiting for you! 🙂

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