The history of the emergence of large-scale bench modeling dates back to the 17th century, when in England, before the construction of new ships, an accurate scale model of the ship’s hull was previously created, the so-called “building model”, on the basis of which the construction of a real ship began.

The first prefabricated models of tanks and aircraft appeared only in the 19th century. Moreover, aviation modeling was the most popular. It became widespread already in the 20th. One of the founding companies was the English firm “FROG” (Flies Right Off the Ground), which produced prefabricated models from 1930 to 1970. In the 70s, the number of competing firms was already large. Such giants as Revell, Italeri, Tamiya, Testors were already confidently on their feet and took the lion’s share of the market, releasing plastic models of ships, aviation and armored vehicles. Unable to withstand the competition in 1976, “FROG” went bankrupt, starting to sell its capacity.

In the late 70s, most of the company’s molds were acquired by the USSR, they were distributed among toy factories throughout the union and produced under the Nova brand. From that moment on, the era of prefabricated models in the union began. Since 2009, these molds have been owned by ARK Model.

The well-known Zvezda company, which is now the industry leader in Russia, was founded in 1990. Zvezda models are more than 500 different types, including military and civilian equipment, aviation, navy and infantry, covering many historical eras – from antiquity to the present day.

In Ukraine, serious development of large-scale modeling began in the late 90s, when, in 1996, SKIF released its first model of the T80-UD tank, and then, with the appearance on the market of such giants as Mini-Art, ICM, Roden, UM, Modelsvit etc. this industry began to develop rapidly. Today there are about fifteen manufacturing companies in Ukraine.