Happy, Happy, Happy (20 page)

Unlike the gadwalls, wood ducks are very distinctive. They’re the only ducks that perch and nest in trees—they have sharp claws—and they’re comfortable flying through woods, hence their name. They also have a unique shape: they’re boxy with crested heads, thin necks, and long, broad tails. The males have glossy green heads with white stripes, burgundy breasts, and buff sides. The female wood ducks are gray-brown with white-speckled breasts. The male wood duck has a thin, rising and falling whistle that sounds like
jeeeeee
; the female makes a loud
oo-eek, oo-eek
sound when flushed and screams
cr-r-eek, cr-r-eek
to sound an alarm.

Keith Powell, who was one of my first employees at Duck Commander, built our first wood duck call out of wood. It has a short little reed in it, and you use your tongue to manipulate the sound. The key to calling wood ducks is you never want to use a flying call when the real ducks are flying. There’s a different call for sitting, and that’s the one you want to use when the ducks are in the air. If you’re flying and the real ducks are flying, then everyone is flying and no one knows where to land. If you call them to sit, they’ll swim right up to your blind so you can shoot ’em!

During the evolution of Duck Commander, we’ve built duck calls from wood, plastic, polycarbonate, and acrylic. We now have single-reeded calls, double-reeded calls, triple-reeded calls, and even reedless calls. We even have some calls today that are injection molded! Our calls come in a variety of colors and styles, but each call is still assembled by hand and custom tuned to make sure it sounds like a duck. If it doesn’t sound like a duck, it’s fixed or thrown into a pile of rejects. Jase, Jep, Si, John Godwin, Justin Martin, or one of a slew of other folks tests every duck call in the assembly room in our warehouse. I think our quality control is what separated our products from our competitors’ a long time ago.

In the beginning, I was quality control. Even though we had the best product on the market, it took a while for sales to really pick up. In the late 1970s, I began to notice that Walmart stores were popping up in a lot of the small towns where I was doing business. Before too long, I noticed the hunting and fishing, sporting goods, and hardware stores that had previously bought my duck calls were closing their doors. I knew if I didn’t find a way to get my products into Walmart, I wasn’t going to be in business for very long either.

So one day, I pulled my old truck in front of the first Walmart I saw, walked in, and said, “Hey, how many of these duck calls do you want here?”

“Duck calls? You mean, off the street?” the lady behind the counter asked me.

“Yeah, yeah,” I answered mildly, noting her resistance.

The clerk laughed and told me, “We don’t buy any duck calls. Son, you need to go to Bentonville.”

“Bentonville?” I asked her, knowing Walmart’s corporate headquarters was several hours away in Arkansas. “Nah, I’ve just got some duck calls right here.”

The clerk firmly told me no thanks and brusquely sent me away. So I drove on down the road and pulled up to the next few Walmart stores I saw. I changed my pitch a little bit to try to get someone interested, playing my tape and blowing my calls to show how they worked. Finally, one of the store managers told me, “I’ll tell you what. You got an order form?”

“Nah, I don’t have an order form,” I told him. “I just figured you could pay me out of petty cash back there in the back of the store somewhere.”

“Well, I’ve got a three-part order form I need to fill out,” he said. “I’ll tell you what; I’ll try six of them.”

When the store manager filled out a three-part form with
WALMART
at the top of it and wrote down “six duck calls,” I walked outside looking at my copy and thought,
I’ve got me something here
. Well, when I got to the next Walmart thirty miles down the road, I showed the store manager the form and
told him, “Walmart’s stocking these duck calls. This last store ordered six.”

He said, “Give me what you’ve got.”

That was the beginning of our Walmart business. Using the same technique, I amassed a stack of order forms to show and prove to managers of Walmart stores across four states that other stores were buying our duck calls. I eventually built the business, as our sales loop grew wider, to where we were selling $25,000 worth of calls to Walmart each year.

Then one day our phone rang, and the voice on the other end said, “I need to talk to Mr. Robertson.”

“Yeah, that’s me,” I answered.

“Are you the one who’s getting duck calls into Walmart stores?” the man asked me.

“Yes, that’s me,” I told him.

“Son, let me ask you a question,” he said. “How did you get duck calls into the Walmart chain without going through me?”

“Well, just who are you?” I asked.

“How did you get duck calls into the Walmart chain without going through me?”

“I’m the buyer for Walmart!” he screamed.

There was a pause.

“One store at a time,” I told him.

There was a long pause.

“Let me get this right,” he said. “You
mean to tell me you’ve been driving around in your pickup truck and convincing our sporting goods departments to buy duck calls without even conferring with me, who’s supposed to be doing the buying for the whole Walmart chain?”

“Sir, I didn’t mean to slight you or anything,” I said. “Look, I didn’t even know who you were. Bentonville’s a long way. I’m just trying to survive down here!”

He thought about that for a minute, then said, “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. Anybody who can pull a stunt like that, I’m going to write you a letter authorizing you to do what you’ve been doing.”

“Man, I appreciate that,” I told him.

“I’m going to authorize you to go into our stores,” he said. “You’ll have that letter from me, and that makes it all aboveboard.”

“Hey, I’d appreciate any help you can give me,” I said.

So the buyer in Bentonville wrote me a letter and sent it to me. I got the letter and showed it to every store manager I met. They all told me, “Come on in, Mr. Robertson.”

Our business with Walmart really started growing then. About a year or two later, with sales steadily accelerating, I called the buyer. “Look,” I said, “it’s a computerized world. We can probably speed this thing up if you buy a certain amount of my calls per store.” The buyer told me to come to Bentonville and meet with him. He agreed to buy our calls and distribute them to
Walmart stores, an action that eliminated a lot of our workload and expanded the sale of duck calls into new areas of the United States. Together, we eventually built the account to sales of more than $500,000 per year—big numbers for Duck Commander, but relatively small for Walmart. Our profit from the sales put us on solid ground financially and provided the base for our future growth.

Things went on that way for about twenty years, but then Walmart began to scale down its waterfowl hunting business. Only about one million people in the United States hunt ducks. There wasn’t enough money in it for a company that measures its customer base in multiple millions. We were making what we considered to be pretty good money, but it wasn’t enough for Walmart, which deals in billions of dollars. The duck calls had always been more of a customer service for the company. So, basically, they got out of the duck-call business.

Fortunately, we had expanded our business into other stores, like Cabela’s, Bass Pro Shops, Academy Sports + Outdoors, and Gander Mountain, so we were no longer as dependent on one big contract like Walmart. The specialty hunting stores were not only buying our duck calls, but they were also stocking our hunting DVDs, T-shirts, hats, and other hunting gear. The independent hunting stores have long been some of our most loyal clients and are still a big part of our business today. Without them, we never
would have gotten off the ground. Although we reestablished our business relationship with Walmart a few years later, Duck Commander was able to survive and prosper during the years in which we didn’t do business with the world’s biggest retailer.

Duck Commander has been making hunting DVDs for more than two decades, although the first ones were actually filmed on VHS tapes. I watched a lot of deer-hunting and big-game-hunting TV shows, and I was convinced there was a market for waterfowl-hunting videos when perhaps no one else was. No one had really tried it with ducks, and I was certain we could do it better than anyone else. I rented camera equipment from a company in Dallas and hired Gary Stephenson, a science teacher at Ouachita Christian School, to film our first video. As with our duck calls, not a lot of other people believed my videos would be a success. In fact, Jase told me he was absolutely certain no one would watch them!
Duckmen 1: Duckmen of Louisiana
was released in 1988 and sold about one hundred copies. I set out to film
Duckmen 2: Point Blank,
which took us the next five seasons to produce. We didn’t know anything about making movies, and I had no idea it would take us so long to make a second hunting video.

Jase told me he was absolutely certain no one would watch my videos!

But I knew it was only a matter of time until people started
noticing our videos. They were fun to watch!
Duckmen
hunting tapes were unlike what anyone else was doing at the time. We were blowing ducks’ heads off in slow motion and flipping deer in the swamp. The videos lasted about an hour each and were among the first to include rock music over hunting scenes. I have always been a big fan of classic rock. I loved Lynyrd Skynyrd, Led Zeppelin, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Pink Floyd, and Bob Seger. Lynyrd Skynyrd is definitely my favorite. If there’s one rule at my house, it’s that you never wake me while I’m napping. If you wake me before I’m ready, there’s going to be heck to pay. One day, one of the members of Lynyrd Skynyrd called the Duck Commander office, wanting to talk to me. I was taking a nap at home, and the receptionist at the office was under strict orders not to wake me, so she took a message. I was so mad when I found out. I told everyone, “From this day forward, wake me up if the president of the United States or Lynyrd Skynyrd calls!”