K-tel founder launched new way of selling
Before we had Amazon, there was K-tel.
If you watched TV in the 1960s, odds are you saw ads for the Winnipeg-based company’s greatest hits albums or its kitchen gadget: the Vego-Matic. Those ads are the brainchildren of Philip Kives, who was born on a small farm near Oungre, Sask., in 1929, and went on to found K-tel International.
Kives’ childhood was anything but privileged. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, and the family spent many years living on welfare.
As an eight-year-old, Kives already had the mind of a businessman. He bought furs from other kids in school and resold them at fur auctions so he could buy clothes.
Kives is credited with creating the world’s first infomercial in 1962. The ad was for a Teflon non-stick frying pan. While the product proved to be defective — the non-stick material failed to stick to the pan — it sold well enough to show Kives the power of TV advertising.
K-tel was launched, selling kitchen and household products such as the Salad Queen and the Miracle Brush. The ads worked so well that Kives would sell 28 million of those little lint brushes.
The company also found massive success in the music industry by selling compilation albums, which contained hit songs that Kives licensed for a paltry fee. Some of the albums the company released included Hooked on Classics and 25 Polka Greats. By the early 1980s, K-tel had sold more than 500 million albums.
In 2013, Forbes published an article calling K-tel the “Spotify of the ’70s” because of how its compilation albums allowed people to discover new music.
Kives died April 27, 2016, at the age of 87.