Revell

The history of Revell is the story of a great passion that began in America in the late 1940s. It was there, in Venice, California, in 1947, that Lewis H. Glaser, the founder of Revell Inc., came up with the idea of assembling a scale model car from several plastic parts. That marked the birth of plastic model-making. By 1956, enthusiasm for this new hobby had already crossed the Atlantic and revolutionised the leisure activities of countless hobbyists and collectors. Then as now: Revell – synonymous with plastic model making That same year, the German subsidiary, Revell Plastics GmbH, was founded in Bielefeld. Just one year later, the company headquarters were relocated to the neighbouring town of Bünde. From a historic former cigar factory, the company initially distributed only imported original kits from the USA and the UK in Germany and neighbouring countries. The first in-house design – a 1:8 scale BMW R75/5 – was created in 1971. By the mid-1980s, however, the company had established its own design department with an attached production facility in Bünde. This expertise in the design and manufacture of true-to-life plastic model kits has been consistently pursued and nurtured throughout the company’s long history. By the mid-1970s, the distribution network already covered all Western European countries. Since 1976, an extensive range of accessories has complemented the model kit range. Building on these successes, the distribution network was expanded into Eastern Europe in 1978. Further logical steps later included the addition of airbrush products and die-cast metal models to the range. The global success of the Revell brand is illustrated by impressive figures from the plastic model-making sector: in 1995, the brand surpassed the 5,000,000 mark for model kits sold for the first time. Several hundred thousand kits of the Fokker Dr. 1 alone were sold. The most successful plastic model kit worldwide is the Titanic: more than two million copies of the legendary steamship have been sold to date. These figures are all the more impressive when one considers that, in the early days, only a few thousand models a year set off from Bünde to be distributed across the globe. As a club, we were able to play an active role in the development of the kit for the VW T2 and T2 Camper. As a result, these models are replicas of actual vehicles owned by our members here in Germany.