In October 2020, in a 20-square-metre studio flat, Ferencz Tamás started packing paint-by-numbers kits by hand. Five years later he was standing in front of the investors of Cápák között — the Hungarian version of Shark Tank — asking for 20 million forints to expand a business that, according to his own account in interviews, had grown into a 430-square-metre workshop with more than 5,500 designs in its catalogue. The company is Festede, and its story is a useful case study in how a niche Hungarian craft manufacturer gets built.
What Festede actually makes
Paint by numbers needs little explanation: a canvas is divided into numbered areas, each number matching a pot of pre-mixed acrylic paint, and the painter fills in the sections until an image appears. What distinguishes Festede’s version is where and how it is produced. The company states that its kits are made in its own Hungarian workshop — canvases printed and stretched in-house, paints portioned on site — rather than imported as finished goods. A standard kit includes a 40×50 cm canvas (stretched on a frame or rolled), four brushes, numbered acrylic paints, an A3 printed reference sheet, and a PDF of the numbered canvas sent by email.
The catalogue runs on the company’s own five-level difficulty scale, from “very easy” designs with fewer than 500 numbered areas to “very hard” ones with more than 2,500. Custom kits made from the customer’s own photo form a second product line: the buyer uploads a picture, receives a design proof for approval, and only then does production begin. RTL’s coverage of the Cápák között appearance noted that Festede uses its own software with AI assistance to convert photos into paintable numbered designs — one of the details that caught the investors’ attention.
The Cápák között moment, exactly as it happened
Precision matters here, because television appearances are easy to embellish. What is verified by RTL, the show’s broadcaster: Festede appeared in Season 8 of Cápák között in the episode aired on 30 March 2025. Ferencz Tamás pitched the company, asking for 20 million HUF in exchange for a 5% stake, with the stated aim of expanding production capacity and launching a new product category. Investor Lakatos István announced he would make an offer; fellow shark Balogh Levente’s on-air comment — “you’ll get 5 million, and you’ll work for the rest” — captured the tone of the negotiation.
Whether a deal was actually signed in the end is not confirmed by the broadcaster’s account; that claim circulates only via the company’s own blog. The accurate phrasing, then, is that Festede pitched on the show and received an offer — which is still a meaningful third-party data point for a four-year-old manufacturer, and a rare piece of verifiable exposure in a product category dominated by anonymous imports.
“Everyone can paint” — the founder’s argument
In an interview with Wakeup Magazin after the broadcast, Ferencz Tamás made the point he repeats in most of his public comments: the typical Festede customer is an adult, not a child. The appeal, in his framing, is not artistic training but the experience itself — a structured, screen-free activity where the numbers remove the fear of the blank canvas. It is worth keeping his claims at interview value: the workshop size, the design count and the customer profile come from the founder’s own telling, not from audited figures. What can be checked independently is the product, the published terms, and the RTL episode.
The commercial terms are unusually consumer-friendly for a small manufacturer. According to the company’s FAQ, Festede offers a 50-day, no-questions money-back or exchange guarantee — well beyond the standard 14-day withdrawal period in Hungarian e-commerce — plus free paint top-ups within two months if a colour runs out. Delivery runs through MPL and GLS couriers in two to five working days, and the shop officially serves Hungary, Croatia and Slovenia. Prices sit roughly in the 8,990–17,990 Ft band depending on kit type and options, though the range shifts with promotions and is best checked on the site.
Why a manufacturing story matters in this category
Most paint-by-numbers kits sold online in Europe are white-label imports; the seller is a storefront, not a producer. Festede’s wager is the opposite: keep printing, paint-matching and packing in Budapest, publish real company data (Festede Kft., with a named founder), and let the production story carry the brand. That choice has practical consequences customers can feel — custom designs approved before printing, replacement paints from the same batches, a guarantee backed by the people who made the kit.
For anyone searching “számfestő” in Hungary, the category is now crowded. The differentiators worth checking are exactly the ones this company has made verifiable: who makes the product, what the guarantee says, and whether the business exists beyond a checkout page. On those three questions, Festede has — partly thanks to a television appearance it could not have scripted — put more on the record than most of its competitors.
Useful references for this topic: Service details, Authority guidance, Industry context, Further official reference.
