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 The Lang Brothers first shot to fame as the owners of Danhausen, a shop in Aachen Germany, which had been founded by their grandmother Emma Danhausen in 1921. The shop had originally sold bicycles and cycle parts but soon stocked toys as well, and, having taken over the shop from their mother, the brothers decided, in 1971, to diversify into selling model cars both over the counter and by mail order. In 1973 they launched the Danhausen Model Car catalogue which became the "bible" for model car collectors all over the world until it ceased publication in 1993.

 The early 70's saw the start of the 1/43 scale metal kit industry. The early kits from pioneers like John Day and Mikansue were quite crude but in 1974 Mike Stephens launched the Western Models range. Western Models kits were easier to fit together than most of the other early kit ranges  because they had been designed so that they could be easily assembled by hand on a small production line making it viable to produce hand finished models as well as kits.

The first release was a Mercedes 540K and Danhausen was the first trade customer for the model. As the 1/43 market grew the Lang's decided to launch their own kits using various names including Plumbies, Plumbies Inter and Metal 43 together with Minichamps which was a range of 1/43 kits of racing cars. The kits and handbuilt models were mainly produced by Western Models although some were mastered and produced by Andre Marie Ruf (AMR) in France.

By the late 80's the Lang brothers had split and Paul Gunter Lang and his wife Romy had taken over Danhausen. They had also taken over AMR but soaring labour costs meant it was becoming difficult to produce quality handbuilt models for a viable price and falling sales led Paul Lang to look at other ways of producing high quality models at a more affordable price.

Initially he joined forces with Kelvin Kwan at Unique Toys and in 1990 they launched the UT Models range of 1/18 scale diecast models and in 1991 the first 1/43 scale diecast model in the Minichamps range - the Audi V8 DTM - was launched.

The original Danhausen shop closed in 1993 but Paul and Romy Lang have worked with various companies in China to expand the Minchamps diecast range which has gone from strength to strength and diversified to include model motorcycles, tanks and other military vehicles as well as model cars in various scales.