Is Tobio’s Legit? An Honest Look for Beginners

The short answer

Yes. Tobio’s is a real, US-registered company with 4.8 stars from 6,801 reviews on the kit itself and a 30-day global return guarantee. Most of the scam complaints you’ll run into trace back to lookalike listings sold by other people on marketplaces — not to orders placed here.

Who is behind Tobio’s

Me. My name is Mel, the brand is named after my cat, and it started because I wanted to paint in cafés and on my commute and couldn’t find a kit small enough to carry. That’s the entire origin story, and there’s more of it in the Tobio’s story.

It matters here for one reason: a faceless dropshipper doesn’t have a founder who answers emails, and the staff names that keep turning up in our reviews belong to actual people on a small team. You can put a face and a company address to this business — which is not something you can say about the listings this article is about to warn you off.

What the real reviews say

The kit has 4.8 stars from 6,801 reviews on site. Off site, our Trustpilot profile sits at 4.5 out of 5 from 1,361 reviews at the time of writing — and that number moves, so check it live rather than taking my word for it.

The theme that comes up most is customer service. People write in about a missing part or a parcel that went astray, someone on the team sorts it, and the review ends up being about that instead of the paint. I’d take that pattern over a wall of five stars with nothing behind it. For a fuller breakdown of how the kit actually performs, the honest version is in the Tobio’s kit review.

The honest downsides

The paints are student-grade, and that’s a deliberate choice — they’re forgiving, they lift and rework easily, and they’re priced so a beginner can experiment freely without feeling like every stroke costs something. If you paint professionally or you’re used to artist-grade pans, you’ll want to keep using your own paints; this isn’t the kit for that.

The book is mini-sized on purpose, because the whole thing is built to fit in a pocket. That’s the trade. If you like working across a big sheet or a full canvas, 60 pages of pocket-sized cotton paper will feel small. Twelve colors is the same kind of trade: the palette is picked to teach you mixing (the skill that matters most early on), and most people stay there happily for a long time — when you do want more range, the 50-color paint set ($34) is the natural upgrade. The kit comes with one water brush, which covers almost everything a beginner needs; when you want a few sizes to switch between, the artist brush set ($21.99) is there for that. Not sure it’ll suit you? The return and money-back policy covers changing your mind, not only faults.

About those scam reviews

Search the brand name and you’ll find people who say they were scammed. Some of those complaints are ours to own, and they’re usually about delivery. The larger share are about something else.

This happens to most small brands that do well on social media: a product gets popular, listings appear using the same photos and a name a letter or two away from the original, and there’s a lag before anything gets taken down. Kits get sold on marketplaces under names very close to ours by sellers we have no relationship with, and buyers have reported opening those orders and finding a wooden palette and not much else. From the outside it looks like the same product, so the review lands on our name — and the person who wrote it has every reason to be angry. We can only stand behind what ships from us. There’s a longer answer on which marketplace listings are official in our guide to whether Tobio’s is sold on Amazon.

How to make sure you get the real thing

Buy direct. Ordering the official Watercolor Kit ($36) from this site is the only way I can promise you the actual product and the 30-day guarantee behind it.

It also helps to know what should be in the box, because that’s how you spot a fake before you’ve lost any money. The real kit contains twelve paint tubes, a walnut wood palette in two magnetic halves that clip together and clip onto the book, a hardcover book with an embossed logo holding 60 sheets of 300 gsm cotton paper, a refillable water brush, a wristband towel for wiping it, and a gift box. A listing offering the palette alone at a suspiciously low price is not the kit.

Check the seller name as well as the product name. And remember a guarantee only means something if the person selling to you is the one who wrote it — we can’t honor ours on an order that never came through us, because we have no record of the sale and no way to verify what you were sent.

Is it worth it?

That depends on what you want it for. What Tobio’s is good at is portability: the whole thing fits in a pocket, the palette clips onto the book so there’s no lid to hold open, and the water brush carries its own water so you never need a cup. That combination is the reason the kit exists, and it’s what most of the good reviews are actually describing. You can see the full range in all watercolor kits, and there are separate workbooks if you want prompts to paint over.

What it is not is the cheapest way to own watercolor paint — generic sets undercut it comfortably and always will. Completely new to this? Start with the watercolor for beginners guide, spend nothing, and see whether you like painting before you buy anything at all.