Kives’s story one of coveralls to riches
KIVES USED TV TO TURN COMPANY INTO A SENSATION
The story of Philip Kives, who died Wednesday at 87, is one of coveralls to riches.
Born on the eve of the Great Depression, Kives was raised on a Saskatchewan farm without running water or electricity and received no education beyond high school. But he went on to become one of the country’s most successful pitchmen, turning his Winnipeg-based K-tel International into a true household name.
“He was wearing coveralls picking rocks on the family farm when he was in his 20s,” his nephew and former business associate Mickey Elfenbein said in an interview Thursday.
“He had the gift, he had the drive, he had the strength and determination to build a huge organization and personal wealth.”
For a certain generation of Canadians, Kives’s gift was inescapable, whether it was in K-tel’s late-night commercials for Miracle Brushes, Salad Queens and Fishin’ Magicians or on the millionselling compilation records of original hits by original stars.
The son of Jewish immigrants originally from Eastern Europe, Kives (Pronounced KEY-vus) displayed his first entrepreneurial flare as a schoolboy selling the furs of animals he trapped. After graduating, he continued to work on the family farm and made extra money selling pots and pans door-to-door.
It was after he moved to Winnipeg in 1957 that his sales career truly took off.
“In 1959, I made $29,000,” he wrote on the K-tel website. “This was like a million dollars to me, as only a few years earlier I was barely making $1,000 a year on the farm.”
Elfenbein recalls, like a scene out of a movie, his uncle arriving home at the wheel of a Cadillac.
“He’d drive up on the farm in his big Cadillac with these huge fins and he’d pass out silver dollars to his nieces and nephews,” he said.
A successful huckster at country fairs and on the boardwalk of Atlantic City, Kives realized that his skills could be much more effective on television.
He started with a nonstick frying pan, producing a five-minute spot that he called the world’s first infomercial. Sales were impressive but the venture was a flop because the non-stick coating failed to stick to the pan, and customers returned the pans as defective.
He had an eye for gadgets that would appeal and an ear for the words — “amazing,” “easy” — that would reel buyers in.
“We feel we have found a winning advertising formula — and we use it in every commercial we make,” he told The Globe and Mail in 1976. “From time to time we have varied our techniques. But we always came back to the hard sell, because other types of commercials seem to send people away from their TV sets.”
In the mid-sixties, Kives produced a compilation record of country songs, the first of what would become the company’s biggest earner. Paying royalties of a few cents per song per record sold, K-tel leased the rights to best-selling songs and sold such records as Sound Explosion, Hooked on Classics and 25 Polka Greats. Operating in 20 countries, K-tel had sold more than 500 million albums by the early 1980s.
Elfenbein, who worked with his uncle for 27 years and served as K-tel chief executive in the 1990s, said Kives was a tough businessman who used his lack of polish to his advantage.
“He would sit across from people, and they thought they were talking to a country bumpkin,” Elfenbein said. “His grammar was not the best, some of the words he wouldn’t pronounce properly.
“They would ask him a question and he would say, ‘What was that again? Can you repeat the question?’ What they didn’t know was that he was already five steps ahead of them.”
He was also something of a gambler, which led him to diversify into oil exploration and real estate in the late 1970s, ventures that helped drive K-tel into bankruptcy protection in 1984. It emerged slimmed down a year later, and built sales back up to over $100 million a year, Elfenbein said.
Kives had a passion for horse racing and owned a stable of thoroughbreds in Winnipeg. He claimed to be able to spot a prize horse as surely as he could identify a winning product. “He’d say, ‘I can look a horse in the eye and know if it’s a good runner or not,’ ” Elfenbein said.
Long past needing the income, Kives continued to work almost up to his death, driving himself into the office. In 1979, he told the New York Times, “I have always set goals in my life and once I reach ’em, I set new ones.”
Elfenbein said his uncle never stopped coming up with a new 10-year plan. Just a few weeks ago, they spoke on the phone, and Kives was gushing about a new country-music compilation K-tel had released for the Canadian market.
“He said, ‘It’s selling like hotcakes,’ ” Elfenbein recalled.