Model Shop Competitors

Thank you for visiting The Range LinkedIn page. With enormous product diversity, The Range has over 65,000 products across 16 departments including DIY, Kitchen & Dining, Furniture, Lighting, Arts & Crafts and Textiles. The Range was founded in 1989 by Chris Dawson in his home town of Plymouth as an open air market trader. Fast forward to the present day and The Range has over 160 stores across the United Kingdom and Ireland, not to mention an ever expanding website offering a home delivery service.

Hobbycraft is the UK's leading art and craft retailer. In a market traditionally serviced by small specialist shops Hobbycraft is the first national retailer to cater for more than 250 different activities all under one roof. We have over 100 stores across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland and growing digital channels and a social media audience of over 750,000.

Airfix was founded in 1939 by Nicholas Kove, a refugee from Hungary who originally manufactured rubber inflated toys. The name Airfix was chosen because part of the process involved fixing air into products. Kove believed that all successful companies should have their names at the beginning of business directories and consequently the name Airfix was born. After the Second World War he switched to producing plastic combs, and was the first manufacturer to introduce an injection moulding machine. In the late 1940s Airfix was approached by Harry Ferguson (the tractor manufacturer) to make a cheap model of one of his tractors that could be used by his sales team as a promotional tool. At first there were problems making the model, so it was decided to make it in a series of parts to be assembled by a team of skilled workers. This ready-built tractor proved to be popular and Ferguson allowed Airfix to produce them as toys and sell them under the Airfix name. It soon became obvious that more tractors could be sold if they were cheaper, and to achieve this they sold the kits unmade with instructions. This proved to be successful and shortly after Woolworths approached Airfix suggesting that by using a more stable polystyrene plastic and poly bags with a card header, it would meet the Woolworths retail price of 2 shillings. The small scale Golden Hind was launched in 1952. Woolworths buyers than began to ask for more subjects, then soon after Airfix began to produced a wider range of polybagged model kits - the all famous Spitfire model appearing from 1953.