Product Update
Is Fun Fancy Dress Still in Business? (2026 Update)
Is Fun Fancy Dress from Dragons’ Den still around in 2026? The deal it made, the dragons who invested, and where to buy Fun Fancy Dress today.
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Fun Fancy Dress pitched a plan to turn a single fancy-dress shop into a franchise chain of twenty stores across the UK. It landed the full amount asked for. The company itself, however, did not make it, and the paperwork confirms exactly when it stopped.
The Short Answer
Fun Fancy Dress is no longer in business. Companies House records show the registered company was dissolved on 17 January 2017, several years after the pitch aired. There is no current storefront or franchise network operating under that name today.
Worth being precise here, this is a confirmed closure with an official dissolution date, not a guess based on an old website going quiet.
Fancy dress is also a heavily seasonal trade, a large share of annual revenue tends to land in the run-up to Halloween and a smaller spike around Christmas and World Book Day, which makes cashflow planning for a growing franchise chain genuinely difficult compared with a retailer selling something people buy year round.
The Pitch
Founder Peter Hart brought his Coventry-based fancy-dress shop into Series 9, Episode 3, asking for £100,000 in exchange for 50 percent of the business. That is as much equity as a founder can realistically offer while still keeping control, half the company for the cash to fund expansion.
The plan was ambitious for a single-shop retailer: use the investment to open a franchise network, with a target of ten to twenty franchise stores within two years.
A clean, unrenegotiated deal like this one usually signals a Dragon who is confident in both the founder and the sector, Bannatyne had already built and sold businesses in leisure and franchising, so the fit looked strong on paper at the time.
The Deal That Got Done
Duncan Bannatyne backed the pitch and matched the ask exactly, £100,000 for 50 percent. No renegotiation on either side, a clean deal by Den standards.
Bannatyne's background in leisure and retail franchising made him a logical partner for a founder trying to scale a single shop into a multi-site chain, this was squarely in his wheelhouse.
Costume retail is also a category where online-only competitors can undercut a physical franchise model badly, shoppers increasingly buy a one-off Halloween or fancy-dress costume from a website rather than visiting a specialist shop, which puts extra pressure on any bricks-and-mortar franchise plan.
What Happened to the Franchise Plan
Franchising a fancy-dress retailer is a genuinely hard business to scale. It depends on seasonal spikes, Halloween, World Book Day, party season, carrying deep stock across hundreds of costume lines, and competing against both independent shops and, increasingly, fast online retailers who do not need physical premises at all.
Whatever combination of those pressures the company ran into, the twenty-shop franchise vision did not survive to become a lasting national chain. The company was wound up in January 2017, roughly five and a half years after the investment was announced.
It is worth remembering that a dissolved company is not automatically a story of failure in the dramatic sense, plenty of small retail businesses wind down quietly for ordinary reasons, changing personal circumstances, a lease coming to an end, a founder moving on to something else, rather than collapsing under debt.
Where Things Stand Now
Here is the recap. Fun Fancy Dress pitched a franchise expansion plan in Series 9, asked for £100,000 for 50 percent, and got exactly that from Duncan Bannatyne.
The company was dissolved in January 2017 and is not trading today. If you are looking for fancy dress shopping in 2026, this particular Dragons' Den business is not where to find it, note that there are unrelated fancy-dress retailers with similar-sounding names still trading, so it is worth double-checking who you are actually buying from.
None of that seasonal pressure is unique to this business, it is a structural challenge every fancy dress retailer faces, but it is worth understanding as background to why a franchise plan built around rapid store-count growth can be harder to execute than the pitch made it sound.
Common Questions
Did Fun Fancy Dress get a deal? Yes. Duncan Bannatyne invested the full £100,000 asked for, in exchange for 50 percent of the business, in Series 9, Episode 3.
Is Fun Fancy Dress still trading? No. Companies House records confirm the registered company, Fun Fancy Dress Limited, was dissolved on 17 January 2017.
What was the franchise plan? Founder Peter Hart wanted to grow his single Coventry shop into a chain of ten to twenty franchise stores across the UK within two years of the investment.
Where to buy Fun Fancy Dress
Still selling as of 18 April 2026. Check today's price and availability.
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See the full Fun Fancy Dress deal breakdown and term sheet →
