DAK Industries
Open-knowledge reference entry
The DAK Catalog was published by DAK Industries, a discount electronics importer in the United States, and was named after the initials of the company's owner, Drew Alan Kaplan.
Founding
DAK Industries was founded in 1966 and during the 1980s became a mail-order electronics firm based in Canoga Park, Los Angeles, California. A gadget enthusiast, Kaplan founded his business while studying psychology at UCLA. On the side, he sold reel-to-reel tapes and installed stereos.
Kaplan spent five years at UCLA, but never earned a degree, then went into business full-time, setting up shop in North Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, to sell recording tapes. The Los Angeles Times once called DAK "the L.L.Bean of consumer electronics", adding though that Kaplan was reclusive and rarely granted interviews, and refused to be photographed.
1980s
Before the Internet, companies like DAK relied on catalogs and print ads to generate sales and incurred high costs for printing and mailing. A large enterprise would have to create a great many catalogs to get sufficient sales. In 1985, Kaplan was involved in a lawsuit with his former printer, and court records show that he had ordered a run of 3.8 million catalogs.
By the late 1980s, DAK was a $120 million per year business with around 400 full-time workers. It was selling everything from radar detectors and stereo speakers to security lighting systems, hand-held photocopiers, and televisions with two-inch screens.
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This entry incorporates text from “DAK Industries” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.