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DEFINE YOUR LIFESTYLE WITH TYTAX®
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While watching the movie "JOBS," which tells the story of Steve Jobs' life, I found parallels to my own experiences. This feeling is shared by thousands of people around the world who have decided to take matters into their own hands and build their own businesses.
My name is Stanisław Szultka. I was born in 1958, in Brusy, a small town in Poland, in Central Europe. I may not be known on a global scale, but for strength training and fitness enthusiasts, I am the creator of TYTAX machines.
The beginnings of my journey date back to 1988, when I built the first strength training and fitness device in my home garage. I initially built this machine for myself and my wife, but I quickly realized that other people might also want to benefit from my invention. People like us, who wanted to enhance their physical strength or simply improve their appearance.
Stanisław Szultka in the photos below, testing exercises in 1989 on the first prototype of the training machine for his own home gym.
However, the path to building my first training machine was not easy. At that time, I was 31 years old and living in Poland, a country under a communist regime that controlled all economic activity.
Fortunately for me, in 1989, for the first time in Poland since World War II, democratic elections were held, and a non-communist government was formed. This new government introduced a market economy, allowing anyone to start their own business and dream of building their own American dream.
I was still working in educational administration then, and transitioning from a government employee to running my own business was not easy. At that time, inflation in Poland was rising rapidly, reaching hyperinflation levels, and unemployment was very high. It was not a time of economic prosperity and not a good time to decide to open a business.
However, I was young and enjoyed reading American and European bodybuilding and fitness magazines. Since my early youth, I had practiced various sports, especially tennis.
My interests inspired me to start my own company. I did not hesitate long about whether and what kind of business to start because my wife and I loved exercising on the training machine I had built for our small home gym.
We founded the company in 1991, and I began building better versions of that small home gym.
However, my garage, which had an area of 20 square meters, had no room for larger production. Therefore, in 1991, we decided to build a small factory. We did not have the money to hire a professional construction company to build the factory. So, I had to build it myself, with the help of my family.
The photos below show me at 33 years old, performing construction work. In the middle photo, I am with my father, who helped with the construction of the first small factory.
Building the small factory was a tremendous effort for us, but equally challenging was acquiring the equipment needed to produce the training machines. I could never have managed it alone without my father, who was the designer and maker of most of the devices needed in the production process.
We began production in the new factory in 1992. From 1992 to 1996, we produced only successive versions of the S6 training machine. This was a single-station training machine on which many valuable exercises could be performed. It was mainly purchased by people to equip small home gyms.
Below are photos of the S6 training machine from 1999.
To expand our offerings, in 1996 we began producing machines that could be used by several people simultaneously. These machines were sold in Poland, primarily to schools for equipping their fitness studios.
Over a few years, we supplied approximately 2000 schools in Poland with these multi-station strength training and fitness machines.
This expanded range of training machines and the growing market demand necessitated the construction of another, larger production facility in 1999. At that time, we also produced a weight bench, but it was not something that could win the hearts of our customers.
Photo of the first weight bench from 1998.
Therefore, in 1999, I decided to design a professional, multifunctional machine for bodybuilding and fitness exercises. It was to be a multi-station training machine capable of providing a professional and varied strength and fitness training experience. This machine was primarily intended for equipping professional home gyms.
However, it was also targeted at commercial clients, such as small fitness studios, personal trainers, police forces, military units, and other similar settings. Essentially, it was designed for any place where one machine, in a small space, could offer a professional strength and fitness training solution.
After several months of intensive design work and exercise testing, the prototype of the currently produced T1-X machine was created.
Below are photos of the machines from 1999. At that time, they were still named CONAN.
At that time, the machine was very good, but I still saw potential for improvement. For several years, this training machine was sold under the name CONAN exclusively in the Polish market. However, my dream was to find customers worldwide, particularly in the American market.
By working hard and having a clear goal, we fulfilled our dreams, and in 2003, we sold our first training machine to the USA. However, in this market, we immediately had to compete with the offerings of American training machine companies. This was challenging for us because we were a company from Poland, without any support from the Polish government. We came from a country that American consumers did not associate with high-quality strength training and fitness equipment.
The only chance to stay in this market and not be defeated was to build successive, better versions of the training machines, following the principle of "win or die." Aware of the hard work we had done so far, we were not afraid of new challenges and were ready to compete in the American market. Therefore, I immediately began designing new, improved versions of the machines.
At that time, we also started thinking about becoming a global brand and began selling our training machines to customers worldwide. But how could we show customers around the world that our machines were unique, with unlimited training possibilities, and make them want to buy them from a country thousands of kilometers away?
Our machines are probably among the few products in the world that undergo such an incredible transformation during use, as each machine allows for at least 500 different exercises. In the era before the Internet, it would not have been possible to accurately show customers worldwide the exercises and instructions for setting up the machine for workouts, as there was no way to quickly show exercise videos.
The Internet changed everything, especially with the advent of YouTube. But let's go back to the beginnings of our presence in the digital space with the presentation of our machines.
We built our first website in 1997. We did this because we knew that this way we could convey information about our company's offerings faster and better than through other channels (printed advertising materials or trade show participation).
In the early years of our online presence, information was conveyed through text and photos. No one thought about videos back then because internet connections were very slow. However, the world quickly changed, and in 2008, we decided to present our offerings to customers through video.
But it wasn't just a revolution in our company; everything related to online video was at the beginning of a revolution. After all, in 2008, YouTube had only been around for three years.
From 2008, when the first video materials appeared on our website, to 2013, video production was done using the simplest means. The videos were shot in a small room with insufficient lighting and a single HD camera. We did not yet have the knowledge of professional film editing, and slow internet connections for exporting videos to YouTube were a significant problem.
However, we knew that video was a medium worth investing in.
The breakthrough came at the end of 2013, when we decided to build our own film studio. We had to build the studio from scratch, initially fueled only by the dream that one day we would set up our exercise machines (then called TITAN) on the film set we created.
Watch the video showing the creation of our Film Studio.
Our new film studio was completed in May 2014. Since our machines have a military design, the set design of the studio reflects this style as well.
The new film studio is twenty times larger than the space where our videos were previously produced. Such a large studio required a substantial amount of professional lighting.
Therefore, we installed professional lighting from ARRI in our film studio.
The new studio has been equipped with a multi-meter rotating arm that can hold several 4K cameras, allowing for filming a person exercising from various angles.
We started recording the first videos in the spring of 2014. In 2014 and 2015, we recorded several hundred hours of video material. However, at the end of 2015, we decided to rebrand from TITAN to TYTAX.
This was a very difficult decision for us at the time because we had over 1,500 exercises recorded under the name TITAN, which could be performed on the machines we produced. But since we were unable to register the name TITAN as a brand name in many new countries, we decided to change the name of the machines and adopt a unified visual identity for the brand on a global scale.
We ultimately decided on the brand TYTAX®, now protected by the World Intellectual Property Organization. We began recording with the TYTAX brand in mid-2016. By this time, we had already registered the TYTAX trademark in several dozen countries worldwide, including the USA, which is our most important market.
Since 2016, we have continued to record video materials in our film studio over the years. Recording video materials with exercises on our machines has always required a lot of work. Not only because of the vast number of exercises that can be performed on each model, but also because some of the devices we produce are very large and very heavy.
Recording exercises always begins with setting up the machine in the right place on the film set. Since even the lightest of our machines weighs over 350 kg/770 lbs, one of the many challenges we had to solve was the ability to easily move the machines on the film set.
See in the video how it's done with the T1-X, which weighs over 700 kg/1540 lbs.
Recording each exercise is preceded by setting up the machine for the specific exercise. See how this looks with the smallest of the machines – the S7 model (it's always important to maintain exercise hygiene at the start).
To showcase the thousands of exercises that can be performed on our machines, a titanic effort was required both on the film set and in the post-production of the videos.
Watch the video to see how the work of recording exercises is done – the footage has been slightly sped up.
When we are recording more exercises and are already very tired, it is nice to have my grandchildren, Piotr and Natalia, visit us on the film set (perhaps in the future, they will appear as models in the recordings of exercises).
Having our own film studio allows us to showcase the technique of performing exercises and the way to set up the machine very precisely from multiple camera angles.
It gives us the ability to immediately record video materials whenever new exercises are developed.
We can significantly reduce the costs of video production. If we outsourced this to an external company, the costs would be very high and would prevent us from making continuous improvements that enhance our machines.
Each year, we refine our video production at every stage. These are often small things, but together they produce significant results.
From the perspective of the past years, we believe that building our own film studio was a strategic decision for our development. We would never have been able to showcase our machines in such a way if it weren't for the capabilities provided by our own film studio.
When we started the production of a small home gym in our newly built facility in 1992, it was done using very simple machines and equipment. The production relied mainly on my good ideas regarding the equipment being produced and my father's decades of experience in how to carry out this production.
Now, after several decades of the company's existence, although numerically controlled machines and robots play an increasingly significant role in the production process, technical solutions devised by my father 20, 30 years ago still play a crucial role.
And, of course, throughout all these years, the entire production technology has been unified by the work of highly skilled employees.
The beauty of our history is that just as our machines evolve, so does their production, undergoing continuous evolution rather than revolution.
Watch a video comparing the old and new technology in our production process.
The strength of our company is based on the respect for what we do for our customers around the world. What we do is supported by my family and wonderful, dedicated employees who always patiently help me fulfill my dreams of building even better machines.
Stanisław (Stanley) Szultka – CEO of TYTAX International LLC – Creator of our machines, with his son Mariusz.
As the founder and CEO, throughout all these years, I have either designed or supervised the design of our machines. However, designing is the result of prior work—testing new ideas in my gym, located next to my office.
Calling it a gym actually understates the significance of this place, as, to be honest, it is the most important place in my company, where new machines and exercises are tested. Every exercise that can be performed on each machine, or on an additional equipment option, has been thoroughly tested by me.
In dozens, hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of repetitions, as in the case of rowing with the RM option.
See how I test the execution of new exercises.
We are known worldwide, mainly for producing large training machines. However, I always remember that it all started with a small training machine, which, after many upgrades, was produced as the S6 model until 2021.
Therefore, in 2021, I decided to pay tribute to this small machine and designed the S7 model.
The S7 is an excellent small home gym, especially suitable for small apartments, with a rich variety of exercises particularly for women.
2022 - Stanisław Szultka against the backdrop of the S7 prototype.
Designing the S7, testing exercises, and recording exercises on a film set with models took over a year in total. But the end result is worth this hard work, as you can see in the video below.
We believe that our machines, which are entirely manufactured in our factory in Poland, will change the lives of many people around the world by bringing joy through physical exercise and providing great health benefits.
My wife and I, as the owners of our company, are delighted that today, several decades after building the first exercise machine in our home garage, our factory is a highly respected global manufacturer of professional strength training and fitness equipment, especially for home gyms.
However, we are particularly proud that throughout these many years, my wife and I have remained faithful to what we started as young people back in 1992: taking care of our health by exercising in our home gym regularly, five times a week, for at least 50 weeks a year. We have done this consistently and honestly over the years because, for us, physical exercise is tireless work, as working out together is wonderful.
That's how our vision was born. Over three decades ago, in a small workshop in the heart of Poland, a desire emerged to create something that would not only improve physical fitness but also inspire others to lead a healthier lifestyle.
Today, our machines are present worldwide, helping people achieve their own dreams of better health and well-being. Our devices are the result of passion, innovation, and an unwavering pursuit of excellence. Each machine is designed with the user in mind, offering not only the highest quality but also unique solutions that adapt to individual needs. From home gyms to professional fitness clubs, our brand has become synonymous with reliability and innovation in the industry.
But what truly sets us apart is our commitment to improving the quality of life for our customers. Every machine we create is a testament to the fact that health and well-being are accessible to anyone ready to take steps towards change.
Join our global community and let us help you achieve your health and fitness goals. Visit our website to discover how our innovative solutions can revolutionize your life.
Fulfill your health dreams with us – because health is true wealth.
Learn more about us, the owners, on page: We Have Been Exercising