The longtime Vancouver establishment began off as a piano retailer in 1926
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There have been numerous advert campaigns in Vancouver newspapers. However few have been as charming as a Kelly’s marketing campaign that ran within the Vancouver Day by day Province journal from Feb. 5, 1949 to Could 19, 1951.
Kelly’s was Vancouver’s premier file retailer within the 40s and 50s — the underside of the advertisements boast the shop had “Canada’s Most Full Inventory of Information.”
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The marketing campaign began off fairly straight, with a easy, elegant illustration of a person in a go well with and the road “males admire the professional service at Kelly’s File Centre.” He’s holding a Kelly’s file bag in his hand.
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However there are hints the nameless artist was just a little completely different. The person is shadowy, “males” is in decrease case, and a file obscures a part of the “Canada’s Most Full Inventory of Information” tag line. It’s fairly arty, for a small newspaper advert.
The advertisements quickly bought very arty, and slyly humorous.
Within the Feb. 24, 1951 advert, a Kelly’s file bag is depicted as a portray on the wall of an artwork gallery, alongside a piece by Pablo Picasso and a nautical portray by West Vancouver artist B.C. Binning. A pair appear confounded by an summary sculpture dubbed Girl and Baby, however one other couple are beaming as they gaze on the stunning artwork of the Kelly’s bag.
One other Kelly’s advert on Jan. 27, 1951 exhibits a younger man with a scruffy beard floating round on a raft, utilizing a Kelly’s file bag as a sail. The wrinkle is that the man is in his underwear, as a result of he’s drying his pants on the raft’s mast. He’s additionally barefoot and carrying a striped shirt, which signifies he’s a beatnik.
However this was in 1951, six years earlier than the time period turned standard in San Francisco. He would have been often called a Bohemian on the time.
The advertisements are very a lot of their period. An April 16, 1949, advert exhibits a miffed older man coming dwelling to a celebration in his home, the place a number of younger {couples} are dancing and cuddling listening to data they purchased at Kelly’s.
Dawn
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“In Vancouver, practically all people buys data at Kelly’s,” was a recurring line in many of the advertisements.
Kelly’s had a protracted historical past in Vancouver, and it didn’t begin off as a file retailer. It bought pianos.
It was based in 1926 by Joseph William Kelly, who had managed Winnipeg’s greatest piano sellers, J.J.H. MacLean, since 1902. On April 30, 1926, The Province introduced he had bought Walter F. Evans Ltd., a pioneer music agency that dated to 1909.
J.W. Kelly Piano Co. Ltd. took over the Walter F. Evans retailer at 657 Granville, promoting radios and phonographs together with musical devices. In some unspecified time in the future, it began promoting data and live performance tickets as effectively.
Kelly died of a coronary heart assault on Aug. 5, 1936, whereas the corporate was in the course of relocating to a brand new retailer at 632 Seymour. His sons took over the enterprise and added home equipment to the combination, and the corporate moved to Seymour and Georgia in 1947.
In 1961, the J.W. Kelly Piano Firm went into receivership, however the file retailer re-emerged out of its ashes. Billing itself as “British Columbia’s Nice File Centre,” it thrived and opened a number of extra shops — by 1965 Kelly’s had shops at Oakridge and Park Royal procuring centres, in Richmond, New Westminster and Victoria.
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Within the 70s and 80s, the industrial model was often called Kelly’s Stereo Marts, and by 1982 was working 37 shops throughout Western Canada. The primary Vancouver retailer was at 949 Granville on theatre row, which opened in 1973 with a mezzanine dubbed the “rock attic.”
There was additionally a wing known as Kelly-Deyong Sound that supplied sound to most of Vancouver’s live shows within the 70s and early 80s.
However the firm had overexpanded. It was all the way down to 18 shops by Feb. 22, 1985, when collectors rejected a proposal from Kelly-Deyong Sound Corp. Ltd. to pay them 25 cents on the greenback over three years, and compelled the chain out of business.
A part of the corporate had been bought off earlier, nonetheless, and Kelly’s Electronics continued to function till it folded in 1992, 90 years after J.W. Kelly bought into the music enterprise.
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You’ve most likely by no means heard of Kurtis Vanel. However within the Nineteen Sixties, he was one in every of Vancouver’s prime recording engineers. Vanel co-owned R&D Studio, the place the Poppy Household recorded Vancouver’s first million promoting file, Which Method You Goin’, Billy?
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