About Supastands
The story
Turning a passion for flight into a new concept
Hi, I'm Gino
About me
So I’ve been around aircraft for as long as I can remember. As an expat kid, I used to travel a lot with my parents when I was young. We moved often and flew regularly, so airplanes were a normal part of my life.
Even though everything around me changed quite a bit back then, model building was something constant. Wherever I was, I could always sit down and build a kit. This gave me something familiar and soothing to focus on.
Getting back into the hobby
30 years later
After settling in the Netherlands, I stopped building. As a young adult, I needed to concentrate on my studies and my social life, and I was too restless to build models anymore.
About 30 years later I picked model building up again. Partly to relax and partly to reconnect with something I used to enjoy. Growing up with Matchbox Monogram and Airfix kits, I was used to finding stands included in the boxes. As a result, I always built them in flight.
I found out quickly that manufacturers no longer include stands. Probably because of box space or mould cost, which makes sense from their side, but it also means some of that magic got lost. So I started thinking about flight stands again.
Finding a solution
Back to the stand
What I found didn’t really match what I had in mind. Some stands were bulky or black and very visible. Most still required drilling into the fuselage or installing magnets inside the model.
I didn’t want either of those, because I didn’t want to modify my models. And I didn’t want a stand that draws attention away from the model itself.
A design approach
Figuring it out
Since I have a background in graphic and product design, I approached the stands like a design problem: how do you support an aircraft model without attaching it to anything?
After quite a few iterations, I landed on a simple idea: let the model rest in a way that uses its own weight to stay in place.
Another question was how to design an unobtrusive stand that doesn't draw the attention away from the model.
That’s what led me to clear acrylic. It’s a simple, clean and strong material that I have been working with for a while now . And most importantly: it's totally transparent. Materials like 3D printing will never give you that same clarity.
Supastands
The result
That’s how Supastands started. Not as a big plan, just as something I made for myself, but that appeals to others as well. The first stand I made was for an F-16 and when I shared a photo of it on Reddit, people started asking where they could get one. Which led to the first production batch, and the rest is history!
Since then I’ve taken my stands to IPMS shows and modelling events in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, and getting overwhelmingly positive feedback.
I plan on riding this little wave of mine as long as I can, and making stands for everybody who wants to display their models in flight.