Mäkelä Italiana; also No.Bli.Ko. - NBK - Nordic
Vigevano

Mäkelä also marketed its products under the brands Ventoniemi, Ilmaphon and Kariniemen Radio

The company's beginnings date back to 1961, thanks to two entrepreneurs of Finnish origin who settled in Italy following the war, the brothers Raimo and Matti Niemelä, who entered into an agreement with the Finnish Mäkelä Oy of Tampere for the supply of frames and parts. unplugged of radios, TVs and turntables.

They settled in Vigevano, where the production of these devices began. The company gradually grew in size, detaching itself more and more from the Finnish parent company and starting to develop its own independent design department.

Mäkelä's peak productivity will reach its peak in the early 1970s, with over 100 employees. However, there was not enough investment in advertising, which is why the brand is hardly remembered by the general public.

In addition to the brand of the same name, Mäkelä also marketed its products under the brands Ventoniemi, Ilmaphon and Kariniemen Radio.

In 1970 the Niemelä brothers left the management of the company to the entrepreneur Enrico Mainetti and started their own business, always creating a new company in Vigevano called Nordic Electronics S.r.l., which however continued to assemble TV sets and compact stereos with frames supplied by Mäkelä. Nordic Electronics will continue its business until the mid-1980s, and then remain active only as a wholesaler of electronic components.

In 1974 Mäkelä produced its first color TV series, the "Nieminen Color 2620" and "Marttila 2612" models. In the same period, agreements were signed with some large furniture factories in central-northern Italy, which played a central role in promoting the Mäkelä TVs honored with the purchase of new furniture. The furniture factories themselves acted as intermediaries for the warranty repair of the appliances.

In 1978 the production of radios and compact Hi-Fi was completely abandoned to concentrate exclusively on the production of black and white and color TVs under the brands Mäkelä, Ventoniemi, Nordic Color and Ilmaphon. In the same year the first TV with frequency synthesis tuning was introduced, the series "Merihelmi 99" and "Salminen 99".

In the same period a distribution branch was created in Melegnano (MI), called Nord Blitz Korporation (also identified as "NBK" or "No.bli.ko."), which had the role of second distributor of the Vigevanese TVs, from them marketed under the Nörding brand.

In this period Mäkelä also had the role of subcontractor for other companies: Mäkelä production televisions were also marketed by the Melchioni organization under the Irradio brand and by the Turin-based Watt Radio.

In the early 1980s, Mäkelä began to navigate in dire straits: there was more and more shadow over the company's future, more and more crushed by competition from the big names and the general crisis in the Italian consumer electronics sector. There was a reduction in the number of employees and the company council and production was now almost entirely focused on assembly for third parties.

Among the latest products of the House were the stereo color TVs "Hirvelä 27 Hi-Fi" and "Naantali 22 Hi-Fi", equipped with a SCART socket and equipped with a teletext decoder.

Mäkelä's adventure ended in April 1984, when the company filed for bankruptcy in the court of Pavia. The activities remained suspended for a certain period, until Enrico Mainetti and his partner Massimo Nazari took over part of the production lines and equipment from the bankruptcy auction, giving life to a new company, Emme-Enne Elettronica s.n.c. of Mainetti and Nazari, continuing for some time the production of Mäkelä brand color TVs, which ended definitively at the beginning of the 90s, when the two partners decided to concentrate on the production, in an artisanal form, of amplifiers and acoustic systems.