Happy, Happy, Happy (17 page)

I always told them that I was fishing the river and following my dream. I got seventy cents a pound on the catfish and thirty cents a pound on the buffalo, which wasn’t a bad living. I was determined to see it through until the duck call business was big enough to support us, and then I would hang my fishing nets up for good. A lot of my friends tell me they thought I was a complete idiot.

Now I ask them, “Well, it’s forty years since you thought I was an idiot; what about now?” Now they’re calling me a genius! Boy, it took forty years for them to turn, but now they finally say, “That old guy ain’t as dumb as he looks.”

I remember making a speech somewhere and a man walking up to me after I was finished. He said, “Mr. Robertson, I’ll tell
you what I got out of that speech: You’re kind of like one of them old Airedale terrier dogs. You ain’t as dumb as you look!”

I told the guy, “Man, I appreciate those words of wisdom.” I laughed at that one; that was a good one.

“Well, it’s forty years since you thought I was an idiot; what about now?” Now they’re calling me a genius!

I might not be the most intelligent guy on Earth, but I always had the wherewithal, determination, and work ethic to turn my business into a success, or at least to make it profitable enough to feed and care for my family, which is really all I ever wanted.

When the serious work started at Duck Commander, I installed a shed roof on the south side of our workshop to shelter a heavy-duty table saw my brother Tommy loaned me to help get the business going. Shavings and sawdust always covered the floor in untidy piles. In one area were cedar shavings, which were cut while we made the end-piece blanks of the duck calls. In another pile was the walnut residue sheared off the call barrels, which I turned on the lathe inside my shop. Several cedar and walnut logs, the woods from which the original Duck Commander calls were made, were piled up in front.

But the most noticeable addition, and the first thing visitors saw when they came to our house, was the roughly lettered sign
that proclaimed
DUCK COMMANDER WORLDWIDE.
I took an old board, painted it white, and lettered it with black. Then I nailed it up at an angle, which I did for a little bit of show (remember what I said about being dramatic?). People would come out to our house, see the sign above the shop door, and walk around wondering, “What have you got out there?” More than four decades later the sign still hangs in front of our property.

Obviously, there was a lot of learning on the job, including enough errors and corrections to drive me nearly mad. But it didn’t take us long to get a production line going, and Alan, Jase, Willie, Kay, and Pa were my crew. Our assembly line was out on the porch of our house, which was screened in at the time. Pa was always helping me. Willie was the youngest, so his job was to sweep up the sawdust in the shop. My oldest son, Alan, was given a little more responsibility—he used a band saw to cut the ends of the calls. Then I ran a drill press to set up and calibrate the end pieces.

Jase and Willie also dipped the calls in polyurethane and dried them on nails, which wasn’t a very fun job. They hung the calls on a piece of plywood, eight feet by four feet, which leaned against one of the big pine trees in our yard. Neat rows of four-inch finishing nails were driven into the plywood, about two inches apart, from top to bottom. They’d open a five-gallon bucket of polyurethane, insert their fingers into the ends of duck-call
barrels until they had four on each hand, then dip them into the thick liquid—submerging a little of their fingers to make sure the resin coated the barrels completely. With a light touch so as not to mar the finish, they worked each one off their fingers as they placed them carefully and separately on protruding nails. Then they repeated the operation until the entire board was filled with shiny, coated duck-call barrels drying in the open air.

It was a very tedious job, and a big one for boys who were so young, but it was all part of our quest to build the best duck calls in the industry. The dipping ensured a smooth, clear, permanent coat of resin that protected the wood. Sometimes, there would be one little rough spot at the mouthpiece end where the barrel touched a nail. When that happened, it had to be sanded smooth before the call could be sold. Once the calls were dry, the boys sanded them down to a fine finish. I think my boys were a little embarrassed going to school with their fingers stained brown from tung oil, but it was one of the hazards of the job. There were always rows of hard tung-oil drippings in our yard, and the trunks of the trees were covered in tung oil. The especially bad part for them was when I figured out that the more you sanded and dipped the calls, the shinier they were. That meant even more dipping!

Last, and most important, I blew every single call to make sure it sounded like a duck. From day one, I was convinced my
duck call sounded more like a live duck than anything else on the market, and I wanted to make sure my products were always perfect. A small flaw in appearance wasn’t critical, but not so in sound. It had to sound like a mallard hen, which was the standard I established for my calls. Duck Commander still follows that same principle today. A faulty call was either fixed or rejected. We used the rejects as fire starters in our wood heater for years.

Another early problem we had to overcome was packaging. We didn’t have any! In fact, I didn’t even have my name on the calls. I went up to the paper mill in West Monroe, and they built me sheets of flat boxes we could cut out and then fold it into shape, in which a duck call would fit neatly. The boxes were plain white with no writing on them.

Armed with my first boxed duck calls, I left home to flood the market. The first sale of Duck Commander calls was to Gene Lutz of Gene’s Sporting Goods in Monroe, and the next was to Harold Katz in Alexandria, Louisiana. Then I drove over to Lorant’s Sporting Goods in Shreveport, Louisiana, a reputable old hunting store that had been in business for years. I walked in and was able to see Mr. Lorant, the owner. I put my boxed duck calls on the counter and asked him, “How many of these duck calls do you want?”

Lorant picked up a couple and looked them over. Then he
looked up at me dubiously and asked, “You want me to buy these?”

“Yeah, put them on the market,” I told him. “They’re Duck Commanders, and I’m going into the business.”

He looked at them again and said, “Where’s the name on them? You don’t have any printing on your box?”

“Nah, they’ll find out who I am,” I replied.

Lorant paused a minute, then said to me in all seriousness, “Son, let me give you some advice: get some printing on your boxes. You have to have some printing on your box. You are not going to do any good with that.”

Then Lorant told me he’d buy six of them. It was the beginning of a good relationship. Once we started building them, Lorant went on to sell thousands—tens of thousands of dollars’ worth.

“Son, let me give you some advice: get some printing on your boxes.”

I took Lorant’s advice to heart, and our packaging became a priority. We had an attractive box printed, which was covered with a transparent plastic top that showcased the duck call. Visible through the top of the box when it was placed properly on a shelf was the duck call and its now-famous logo: a mallard drake with wings cupped and legs lowered, looking down to the land. There was even an attractive sticker affixed to the barrel of the duck call. The first logo drawings were printed in gold on a green
background. “Duck Commander,” “Phil Robertson,” and my Luna, Louisiana, address were easily visible.

Over the next few years, many evenings were spent inside our house, with me blowing Duck Commanders and the rest of the family cutting boxes, folding them, and filling them with the approved calls. No one was exempt from folding boxes. If you came to our house, you were probably going to participate in packaging—after eating one of Kay’s delicious home-cooked meals, of course. It was a sociable time, and everyone talked and enjoyed it as they worked, while tuning out my duck-call blowing. Eventually, I also pressed my brothers into service, and each took his turn on the lathe at one time or another, using the templates to turn out barrels and end pieces.

Even in the early days of the operation, I was planning for our future. As the early Duck Commanders were being built, I carefully measured the calls that sounded just like I wanted with micrometers and calipers, recording and saving the dimensions for the time when we would build molded plastic calls. My database was eventually used to design a uniform product that eliminated the flaws inherent in wood.

But even today, many waterfowl hunters still prefer the wooden calls, and sometimes their sound is superior. At one point, we were doing well enough that I wanted to recall the first
calls we made because they were so crude looking. They weren’t nearly as well done as the newer ones—either wood or plastic. I just wanted to get them out of sight. Some of them looked pretty ragged, and I figured they would hurt future sales. Using a list Kay kept of our customers, we sent out a letter offering them a new Duck Commander if they would send their old one back to us.

I was amazed. The offer was met with suspicion as to what we were up to. Hunters from all over were calling or writing to say they wouldn’t part with their calls for anything. They told us they were the “originals,” and they weren’t going to give them up. We were surprised how quickly we’d established brand loyalty among our customers.

The early marketing of Duck Commander depended strictly on me, although I enlisted my brother Tommy to call on some stores in the East Texas area where he lived. I traveled in a four-state area, driving through Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. I stopped in each town I passed through, calling on small sporting goods stores, hardware stores, five-and-dime stores—any business that looked like it might have an interest in selling duck calls. I did it from an old blue and white Ford Fairlane 500 that Kay inherited from Nannie. While Alan was driving it one time, a delivery truck sideswiped it, and the whole left side—fender,
door, and back panel—was gone. Neither vehicle stopped, and I chose to ignore the accident. But the Ford still ran well and was carrying the first Duck Commanders to market.