Clairtone Sound Corporation Limited was a manufacturer of high-quality sound electronics and accessories based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

. Founded in 1958 by Canadian-Hungarian electronics engineer and businessman Peter Munk

Peter Munk

Peter Munk, CC is a Canadian businessman. He is the chairman and founder of the mining company Barrick Gold, the world's largest gold-mining corporation.-Early years:...

 with furniture designer David Gilmour, the company established an international reputation for stereo and cabinetry design in the 1960s. It had failed little more than a decade later but in its heyday it made a notable contribution to the field of consumer electronics

Consumer electronics

Consumer electronics are electronic equipment intended for everyday use, most often in entertainment, communications and office productivity. Radio broadcasting in the early 20th century brought the first major consumer product, the broadcast receiver...

.

The most famous Clairtone design was the "Project G" series designed by Hugh Spencer. It featured black globe speakers, with a wood cabinet and introduced the now-standard modular approach to consumer audio that offered a dramatic departure from boxy cabinet design popular until that time (and which Clairtone also manufactured). The Project G won a medal at the Milan Triannale as well as a Canada Design Council Award of Excellence.

Clairtone earned a reputation for combining futuristic designs with quality materials, and marketing them well. It opened its first international sales office in New York in 1960 and later hired Frank Sinatra

Frank Sinatra

Francis Albert "Frank" Sinatra was an American singer and actor.Beginning his musical career in the swing era with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, Sinatra became an unprecedentedly successful solo artist in the early to mid-1940s, after being signed to Columbia Records in 1943. Being the idol of the...

 as a pitchman. The Project G system was featured the 1967 film The Graduate

The Graduate

The Graduate is a 1967 American comedy-drama motion picture directed by Mike Nichols. It is based on the 1963 novel The Graduate by Charles Webb, who wrote it shortly after graduating from Williams College. The screenplay was by Buck Henry, who makes a cameo appearance as a hotel clerk, and Calder...

, marking an early example of product placement

Product placement

Product placement, or embedded marketing, is a form of advertisement, where branded goods or services are placed in a context usually devoid of ads, such as movies, music videos, the story line of television shows, or news programs. The product placement is often not disclosed at the time that the...

. It became a true trendsetter when Hugh Hefner

Hugh Hefner

Hugh Marston "Hef" Hefner is an American magazine publisher, founder and Chief Creative Officer of Playboy Enterprises.-Early life:...

 bought one of the futuristic systems.

In 1964, Clairtone opened an electronics division and was an early advocate of transistor

Transistor

A transistor is a semiconductor device used to amplify and switch electronic signals and power. It is composed of a semiconductor material with at least three terminals for connection to an external circuit. A voltage or current applied to one pair of the transistor's terminals changes the current...

s. The company was traded publicly on the Toronto Stock Exchange

Toronto Stock Exchange

Toronto Stock Exchange is the largest stock exchange in Canada, the third largest in North America and the seventh largest in the world by market capitalisation. Based in Canada's largest city, Toronto, it is owned by and operated as a subsidiary of the TMX Group for the trading of senior equities...

, but even as it was winning awards for its innovative designs, Clairtone was facing insurmountable financial troubles. In 1963 it earned a profit of $300,000 on sales of $10 million, and profits decreased the following year as marketing costs rose higher than sales.

The company obtained financial support from the Government of Nova Scotia

Government of Nova Scotia

The Government of Nova Scotia refers to the provincial government of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. Its powers and structure are set out in the Constitution Act, 1867....

 to open an electronics manufacturing plant in the town of Stellarton

Stellarton, Nova Scotia

-External links:*...

. The company decided to switch production to television

Television

Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...

s at this time and was fully operational in Stellarton by the summer of 1966. There were close to 1,000 employees at the time.

Clairtone's entry into the colour television market was ill-timed (the market would not take off for another five years; see History of Television). Sales in 1967 were exceedingly poor, with losses of more than $6 million, and the business began to spiral out of control. In October, 1967, Industrial Estates Limited

Industrial Estates Limited

Industrial Estates Limited was a Crown corporation established by the Government of Nova Scotia in 1963.IEL stemmed from the Voluntary Planning Act, instituted by Premier Robert Stanfield's administration in the same year...

, an economic development agency of the Government of Nova Scotia, took control of the company. Sales continued to decline and share prices plunged from more than $15 in 1967 to a few cents by 1970.

By March 1970, Clairtone was sold to the Government of Nova Scotia and came under new management. At this time it began to offer cheaper products including the world's smallest transistor radio, the "Mini Hi-Fi", but the radio proved to be a copy of an earlier design by Sinclair

Sinclair Radionics Ltd

Sinclair Radionics Ltd was a company founded by Sir Clive Sinclair in Cambridge, England which developed hi-fi products, radios, calculators and scientific instruments.- History :...

. The company hemorrhaged money to the amount of $19 million that year, losses that were absorbed by the province. It was finally closed in 1971. The assets were sold but the company was not officially dissolved until 1979.

Further reading

• Roy E. George, The Life and Times of Industrial Estates Limited, Halifax: Henson College, Dalhousie University, 1974. (IEL was the company crown agency that attracted Clairtone to Nova Scotia and later took over the company.)
• Garth Hopkins, Clairtone: The Rise and Fall of a Business Empire, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1978.
• Nina Munk and Rachel Gotlieb, The Art of Clairtone: The Making of a Design Icon, 1958-1971, by, May 2008. http://www.amazon.com/dp/0771065078
• The Clairtone Sound Corporation Fonds is an extensive archive of photographs, technical drawings and graphical material deposited by Clairtone at Nova Scotia Archives and Records Management
  Nova Scotia Archives and Records Management
  Nova Scotia Archives & Records Management is a governmental archival institution serving the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. NSARM acquires, preserves and makes available the province's documentary heritage — recorded information of provincial significance created or accumulated by government...
  
  , Halifax, Nova Scotia.
• There is also a small archive of Clairtone ephemera (catalogues and brochures) as well as a G2 console at the Design Exchange (DX) Resource Centre in Toronto.

External links

• Flickr: Clairtone Catalogue
• Youtube: 1967 Clairtone TV advertisement featuring the company's founders Peter Munk and David Gilmour.
• Clairtone Collection: Clairtone Collection Website created by Daniel Leblanc and DC Hillier showcasing their extensive Clairtone collection.
• Youtube: 2008 CBC News Feature Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) news feature about Clairtone.