Company thrives on churning out Apple accessories

In the 1950s and 1960s, Realtone Electronics made transistor radios one of the must-have gadgets of the era.

But by the 1970s that gold mine had played out.

For the next two decades the company survived in the electronics business by making clocks for Timex that sold in drugstores and by creatively combining devices.

It made the first cassette tape player/clock radio and the first telephone/clock radio.

It struck gold again in this decade with another combination — speakers with a dock for Apple’s iPod music player.

By tapping into the Apple ecosystem, the company, now called SDI Technologies, has become the largest supplier of speaker and alarm clock docks.

It is also the leading maker of hotel alarm clocks.

Software developers may chafe at Apple’s restrictions and standards for the iPod, iPhone and iPad.

But Apple’s set-in-stone design requirements actually help companies making speaker docks and rechargers because they know that the placement of the connector will probably not vary from one Apple model to the next.

And they are confident that sales of the Apple products will be strong enough that they will lead to large production runs.

In 2005, SDI was trying to figure out how to recreate the company for the digital age.

“I asked one of our designers if he could replace a CD changer from one of our clock radios and let the user wake and sleep from an iPod,” said Ezra S. Ashkenazi, SDI’s president and the son of one of Realtone’s founders. “When I asked that, the karma in the room changed.”

“We recreated the $19.99 drug store alarm clock radio and turned it into a $100 product,” Ashkenazi said.

To increase the likelihood of success with its first Apple accessory, the company purposely mimicked the Apple style in its earliest designs.

“Our instructions to our designers were ‘Make it look like Apple designed it,”’ Ashkenazi said.