Kalimar and Soviet Exports in USA

Kalimar Inc. was established in 1952 by Robert “Bob” Lipsitz in St. Louis, Missouri, United States, as an international importing entity of its parent company, AREL, which he had started with his two brothers, Abe and Ellis Lipsitz. After World War II, AREL was one of the largest photographic distributors, manufacturers, and suppliers in the world. AREL stood for Abe Robert Ellis Lipsitz.

In their teenage years, Bob and both of his brothers, Abe and Ellis, were very interested in photography. Bob started his career working at the camera department of Stix, Baer & Fuller, a department store that had operated in St. Louis, Missouri, since 1892, while his brother repaired cameras to help pay for college. At around the same time, they started their own venture selling darkroom supplies out of their mother’s house, thus establishing AREL.

Bob was also always fascinated with aviation and obtained his pilot’s license at 16. He could not become a fighter pilot because of his color blindness, but instead combined his two passions—photography and flight. During World War II, he became head of the photographic division of the 18th Air Force Combat Camera Unit in England. He filmed many battles during the war. As Air Force Captain Lipsitz, he received a Bronze Star for risking his life to obtain sensational combat footage with handheld cameras aboard bombers heading to Germany. Films shot by Bob Lipsitz included the bombing of Dresden and Berlin and the Allied landings on D-Day. He also filmed Winston Churchill’s VE Day speech and was reportedly the only American present at the event.

After returning from the war, Bob rejoined his brothers at AREL until 1952, when he spun off his own venture. His success began when he traveled to Japan in 1954 and made contact with Toro Konako, the owner of a company manufacturing Aires 35 cameras. After buying a batch of cameras and bringing them back to the United States, Bob began selling them through Kalimar at a retail price of under $100, despite his brothers’ skepticism about the potential success of foreign cameras in the U.S. market. These Japanese cameras were a huge success. They became the number-one-selling camera in their price range in the United States, and Kalimar became the first company in the country to import cameras from Asia.

By 1962, Kalimar had expanded tremendously, importing and manufacturing numerous products in Asia and the United States, generating $18 million a year in revenue, and holding a 22 percent market share of all photographic imports from Japan. Meanwhile, its former parent company, AREL, had gone bankrupt. In the early 1960s, Kalimar was importing cameras such as Yashica and Petri and was one of the first companies in the United States to sell photographic accessories in blister packs.

By the late 1970s, Kalimar had obtained a distributor in Panama called International Ciers, S.A., which maintained a warehouse in the Colón Free Trade Zone. This firm worked directly with various Soviet factories, including LOMO—the Leningrad Optical and Mechanical Association—and KMZ—the Krasnogorsk Mechanical Factory. Kalimar would order cameras through Panama and place metal tags bearing the Kalimar logo and model name or number over the original Soviet camera logos. These metal tags were made by a private contractor in his basement in St. Louis, Missouri. Kalimar also used the same contractor to make metal tags for Cambridge Camera Exchange and Ritz Camera/Quantaray for Zenit cameras that were resold to those companies.

Seeing strong demand for Soviet Zenit cameras, Kalimar also ordered custom Zenit E and B cameras from KMZ through T.O.E. London during the 1970s. These cameras featured the Kalimar logo factory silk-screened onto their bodies and supplemented the company’s line of Soviet photographic products.