K-tel
K-Tel International is an "As-Seen-On-TV" company, which is most noted for its compilation music albums, such as The Super Hits series, The Dynamic Hits series and The Number One Hits series. It is also known for "The Record Selector," "The Micro-Roast," "The Tote-a-Tune portable stereo," and many other products.
History
The company has been in business since the late 1960s and is based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. It also has subsidiaries or other controlled entities in the U.S., the UK and Germany. In the UK, the company is known as "K-tel UK Limited." In the U.S. and Canada it is known as "K-tel International," with U.S.-distributed compilation albums distributed from Plymouth, Minnesota.
The founder of K-Tel was Philip Kives. Kives, a demonstration salesman who had previously sold cookware door-to-door and in a department store, used television advertising in 1962 to sell Teflon-coated frying pans to a large-scale audience. Kives bought and marketed a number of other products from Seymour Popeil, father of Ronco founder Ron Popeil, such as the "Dial-o-matic," a type of food slicer that allowed the user to "dial in" the thickness of slices produced, the Veg-O-Matic, and the "Feather Touch Knife." The combination of inexpensive goods, mail-order distribution and a simple sales pitch were a novel combination in television advertising in the early 1960s. Kives took his "Feather Touch Knife" on the road to Australia starting in August 1965 and by Christmas had sold one million knives with a net profit of one dollar a knife.
