Our Story
From a Facebook group to the country's most prestigious painting competition
It all started with a Facebook group. In 2020, three painters – Pintér Csaba, Kőrösi Csaba and Bernáth József – set up the AIRLESS ÉS EGYÉB SZÓRÁSTECHNIKA group so that the rapidly spreading airless spray technology would finally have a professional forum: a place where painters could ask each other for advice.
A question with no one to ask
Airless spray technology was spreading fast in Hungarian contracting. The machines had arrived and the technology was promising, but the experience was scattered: everyone learned on their own jobs what worked and what did not. Anyone who got stuck had no one to call – a professional forum where colleagues answer colleagues simply did not exist.
The AIRLESS group filled this gap. In the early days a few dozen professionals asked and answered each other's questions, but even then the topics were exactly what the trade was grappling with at the time.
From a question to a community
Membership grew rapidly: first to a few hundred, then to a thousand, and today more than seven thousand professionals are members of the group. Members help each other every day, share their experience and look together for answers to the questions that come up in practice.
What made the community credible is that the answers do not come from a catalogue. Someone posts a question in the morning, and by late morning several people have answered it – drawing on the work they did themselves the day before.
What you don't see from the outside
In the early days this placed a considerable burden on the founders. The phone rang more and more often with requests for help with airless spraying, there were more and more messages to answer, and someone had to settle the conflicts arising in the group and the debates that ran late into the night.
This time did not come out of working hours, but out of evenings at home, weekends and hours spent with family.
An ecosystem grew around it
After a while, paint manufacturers also took notice of the group: they were looking for professional experience and feedback to optimise their products for airless spraying – and they found it here in the AIRLESS group, in the everyday experience of contractors. Companies selling airless paint and filler sprayers also joined, and so a complete airless ecosystem gradually grew around the group: painters, manufacturers and distributors at the same table, talking about the same technology.
2022: from community to organisation
In 2022, Airless és Egyéb Szórástechnika Kft. was founded and launched the Painter of the Year competition. By then, the professional organisations had also taken notice of the initiative and got behind the competition.
The competition was not a marketing idea but a continuation of what had been going on in the AIRLESS group for years: professionals showing each other how to do the job well and how to produce master-quality work. This brand independence has remained one of the competition's most important features ever since – it is supported jointly by market players who are otherwise competitors.
Three of us started it
Over the years, life took the founders in different directions: Kőrösi Csaba is now less involved in the group's day-to-day running, and Bernáth József has gone his own way. Today the AIRLESS group is carried on the shoulders of Pintér Csaba, for whom the road has not been easy; despite much criticism and many attacks, he has always stood up for honest craftsmanship. In 2024 the trade recognised this by electing him president of the Hungarian National Guild of Painters, Decorators and Paperhangers (SZMTOI).
What it is all for
This is how our story began: ordinary painters joined forces in an extraordinary way so that the painting trade could preserve progress, quality and professional humility. The Painter of the Year competition is the most visible form of this joint effort, but the essence is still what begins every morning in the AIRLESS group – that there is someone to ask and someone to answer.
Anyone who joins the AIRLESS group or the Hungarian National Guild of Painters, Decorators and Paperhangers today, or enters the Painter of the Year competition, becomes part of this community of several thousand people that has grown so close.
God bless honest craftsmanship!
Pintér Csaba
master painter
Founder of the Painter of the Year competition and of the Airless és Egyéb Szórástechnika group,
President of the Hungarian National Guild of Painters, Decorators and Paperhangers (SZMTOI)