King of the Kitchen

A minor mystery to most U.S. males is the fact that housewives always seem to have room for another spoon or egg beater in their crowded kitchen cabinets. But Chicago's 57-year-old Arthur Keating solved the mystery long ago. As head of Ekco Products Co. and king of the U.S. kitchenware business, it is his job to make women want ever more household gimmicks. Keating estimates that nearly a third of existing gadgets disappear every year: they are lost in the garbage, carted away by children, or battered shapeless by amateur earthmovers in the backyard. Keating makes it his business to put the rest out of date.

A Bigger Slice. In the depths of the Depression, when other businesses were going to pot, Keating streamlined his spatulas, basting spoons, kitchen strainers, etc. into atched sets with nine color combinations. Result: sales tripled. To boost his sales of knives, he put out sets of six or more in safe and handsome "holdsters"; his cut of the knife market doubled in six months. Keating claims he was first on the market with the gear-type can opener; now he has made his original model obsolete by a new one that opens bottles, punctures beer cans and removes vacuum caps as well. To keep the steam in pressure cooker sales, Keating reheated them with a cooker big enough to sterilize baby's bottles, too.

By such smart merchandising, Keating has built up a line of 2,000 products ranging from a 5-c- pie pan to a $39 set of stainless steel "Diamondware" table service. Last year his Ekco Products Co. sold 375,000 egg beaters, 10 1/2 million kitchen knives, 2,500,000 rubber-ended bottle stoppers, 1.5 million pots & pans and 12 million can openers. Disguised under such brand names as A. & J., Flint and Ovenex, Ekco Products brought in a 1951 gross of $35 million, a net of $2,700,000.

In 23 years, Kitchen King Keating has bought out or organized 16 smaller companies and founded a big subsidiary in Britain. Last week he announced another buy. For $1,254,000, said he, Ekco will acquire the Republic Stamping & Enameling Co. of Canton, Ohio, manufacturer of enameled pots & pans and various refrigerator accessories (1951 sales: $3,000,000).

Knives by the Carload. Keating, the son of an Austrian immigrant who became a successful tinsmith, got through Chicago's Armour Institute with twelve athletic letters and a cum laude in mechanical engineering. He thinks the best way to render his own products obsolete, and thus create new markets, is to keep improving his designs. He pays Industrial Designer Raymond Loewy $75,000 a year to think up new styles for handles, new color combinations, etc. As a result, in cutlery alone, he is now producing an average of 300,000 knives a week (ranging from 10-c- to as much as $5.95). When he first asked for a carload freight rate on knives, the railroads refused to believe anyone shipped that many; Keating has shipped three full carloads in nine weeks alone.

To attain such mass production, Engineer Keating developed many special machines. From his $400,000 research laboratory have come such devices as a wire-former that automatically shapes strainer forms at a clip of 1,500 an hour, a woodworking machine that turns out knife handles in one operation instead of four, a sharpener for potato peeler blades that is so safe and automatic that its operators read the comics while feeding blades into it.

Keating is convinced that the trend toward modernized kitchens has created a "vast, unreached potential" for his products--come recession or not. Says he: "When a housewife doesn't feel she can afford $200 for a dishwasher, she will still spend 15-c- for a new potato peeler."

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