About Us
I was a freelance graphic designer and I hadn't been near a model railway for thirty odd years until my young nephew got interested in them. So after about a year of taking him to exhibitions I rekindled my own interest and joined a railway club. I started helping out with some of the club’s work making buildings, since one of the things I did as graphic designer was 3D digital architectural models. And I thought it wasn't a great step from 3D models to flattening, printing and putting them on card to turn them into actual physical models. So I started doing some of these for the layouts and people liked them. I started marketing them and it snowballed, taking over all the work I used to do as a freelance graphic designer and turning into what I now do full time.
When I got back into the hobby, I looked at was available and I thought it was all either very nice and very expensive or very cheap and not so nice. So I figured there was room for a cheap but good looking alternative. I try to produce something that’s really good quality, that stands up as a representation of a real building, but that is also very cost effective, because the model railway is a very expensive hobby and people need to save their money where they can these days. The models are designed to be printed on regular domestic inkjet printers and then you just stick that paper on to the various thickness of cardboard that are required. They all come with a very detailed set of instructions and you just need to follow them step by step to assemble the kit. And the beauty of this as that you buy the kit once and you can print it out as many times as you want, whether you want lots of the same kit or if you made a mistake and need to print it out again. I also put lots of options into the kit, so you can build it in lots of different ways.
I also try to encourage the younger modellers, because there’s a thought that modelling is an old man's hobby, due to the quantity of retired and older folks that are trying to do it, but if you don’t encourage the younger into the hobby then eventually the hobby is going to disappear.
In conclusion I'd like to say that Smart Models aim is provide exhibition quality model buildings that that can built by people little or no modelling experience at a price that fill fit any pocket.
Brian Taylor
Smart Models