Tele King's Tune-Up

When the television boom began three years ago, scores of hopeful businessmen, equipped with little more than a bag of tools, a shoestring of capital and boundless hopes, rushed in to make sets. For many, wiped out by stiffening competition, the hopes were short-lived.

For Manhattan's little-known but mushrooming Tele King Corp., the story was refreshingly different. Its father & son founders, shrewd Chairman Louis I. Pokrass, 50, and brawny, bustling 26-year-old President Harvey L. Pokrass, did more than survive. They parlayed a $100,000 stake into a business which, in 1950's first quarter, turned out 60,000 sets, grossed $8,000,000 and rang up a tidy $200,000 in profits. By last week Tele King was among the top ten U.S. television producers.

Small Beginnings. What helped Tele King's remarkable performance was the know-how which Russian-born Louis Pokrass had developed in two previous careers. As a garment cutter in Manhattan's fiercely competitive dress industry, he had learned the importance of unit costs, and how they could be cut by mass production. As a big liquor wholesaler and distributor, he had also mastered the techniques of selling and distribution so well that he claimed to be grossing $20 million a year in 1946, when he sold out for $3,000,000. He felt well able to risk a $100,000 fling in television.

What he lacked in technical know-how he counted on getting from son Harvey, engineer-trained at Ohio State. With a handful of tools and parts, and a force of 50 workers, the Pokrasses leased 16,000 square feet of space in a huge, 20-story Hudson River warehouse, and set up shop. As production boss, Harvey Pokrass finally built an assembly line that could turn out a complete set every 40 seconds, set up a three-month training course for new workers. Harvey also kept Tele King ahead technically by being among the first to switch production to rectangular-tube sets and by developing cheaper cabinets. Remembering the PT-boat hulls molded from plywood, he got a PT-boat maker to turn out for Tele King "seamless" cabinets whose top and sides are molded from one piece of mahogany plywood.

The Big Time. To market this ever-mounting production, Harvey lined up Manhattan's mammoth Macy's department store to take a big part of Tele King production by offering prices which enabled Macy's to undersell "name" brands (Tele King's price range: $179.95 for 12-inch table models, to $399.95 for a 19-inch console and $499.95 for a 16-inch player combination). Soon, Tele King made similar deals with the May Co., one of the biggest U.S. retail chains, and many another big store and appliance dealer.

For the full year of 1950 Tele King expects to produce 250,000 sets, gross at least $30 million. Still growing, Tele King this week took over part of another floor of the warehouse and set up a new assembly line to add 300 more workers. By June it expects to boost production to 1,200 sets a day.

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