The Duck Commander Family (15 page)

When Phil was getting started with his company, he enlisted the help of Tommy Powell, who went to church with us at White’s Ferry Road Church. Tommy’s father, John Spurgeon Powell, made duck calls in a small wood shop, and Phil took him his drawings for the world’s first double-reed duck call. John Powell looked at Phil’s specifications and told him it wouldn’t work.

“It’s too small,” Powell told him.

But Powell told Phil if he could get a block of wood properly bored, he was willing to give his duck call a try on his lathe. Phil took a block of wood that was about three inches thick and six inches long to West Monroe High School’s woodworking shop, where he worked out a swap with the shop teacher. In exchange for four dressed mallard ducks, the shop teacher drilled a hole in Phil’s block of wood. Phil took the wood block to Powell, who turned on his lathe and produced the first Duck Commander duck call.

With a working prototype, Phil set out to make his dream come true. He borrowed $25,000 from the bank with the help of Baxter Brasher, an executive at Howard Brothers Discount Stores, and purchased a lathe for $24,985. Later, Phil learned the lathe was only worth about $5,000 and had been built in the 1920s! The lathe was transported from Memphis to Monroe, and Phil picked up the heavy machinery at the train station with a borrowed dump truck. Phil drove the lathe to our house and cut out the wall of an outbuilding with a chain saw. Somehow, he was able to drag the lathe into his shop by tying a come-along to a tree. Once everything was in place, Phil put a sign outside the shop that read
DUCK COMMANDER WORLDWIDE.

Phil didn’t even have an instruction manual for the lathe or templates to cut the wood for his calls. Obviously, there was a lot of on-the-job learning. But it didn’t take Phil long
to get a production line going, and Alan, Jase, Kay, Pa, and I were his crew. When I was young, we spent most of our days helping him manufacture and package the duck calls. In the beginning, Phil cut end pieces out of cedar and barrels out of walnut. He tried all kinds of wood; he even brought back cypress logs from his fishing runs and cut them into blocks.

Our assembly line was out on the porch of our house, which was screened in at the time. Pa was always there helping Phil. One of the earliest problems with Phil’s duck call was that the two reeds had a tendency to stick together. Pa told Phil that he should put a dimple in the reeds to keep them separated. Phil took a nail and put a dimple in the reeds with a hammer. Uncle Si still uses the same technique in our reeds today.

The great thing about Duck Commander is that it was a family business from the start and remains that way today. When I was younger, I helped by sweeping up the sawdust in the shop. My oldest brother, Alan, used a band saw to cut the ends of the calls, and Phil ran a drill press to set up and calibrate the end pieces. Jase and I also dipped the calls in polyurethane and then dried them on nails. Once the calls were dry, we sanded them down to a fine finish. I was embarrassed going to school because my fingers were always stained brown from tung oil. There were always rows of hard tung oil drippings in our yard.

The especially bad part for Jase and me was when Phil figured out that the more you sanded and dipped the calls, the shinier they were. That meant more dipping for us! Phil would
tell us, “Hey, go dip the duck calls. There’s about twenty of them.” But when he said there were twenty or twenty-five, it always meant there were seventy-five to one hundred, and “thirty or thirty-five” meant there were probably one hundred and fifty. Phil was a notorious foreman on the duck-call assembly line.

Last, and most important, Phil blew every single call to make sure it sounded like a duck. From day one, Phil was convinced his duck call sounded more like a live duck than anything else on the market, and he wanted to make sure his products were always perfect. Duck Commander still follows that same principle today.

In the early days, the work never seemed to stop. My brothers and I cut boxes and folded them to package the duck calls. I don’t think child labor laws applied to us down on the mouth of Cypress Creek. When it was dark and you went inside to eat dinner and watch TV, you started folding boxes. We sat in the living room folding boxes, and they’d be scattered across the room. There was a plastic sleeve with a logo that we slipped over the boxes. The Duck Commander logo—which is now famous—is a mallard drake with wings cupped and legs lowered, looking down at the land. The logo was printed in gold on a green background and was placed on each of the calls. Phil’s name was also on the package, along with our home address.

Duck Commander is a lot like Phil’s duck gumbo. The
gumbo is perfect only when it has the right blend of ingredients—garlic, bell peppers, onions, shallots, sausage, spices, and, of course, duck. When my brothers and I were growing up, everyone in our family played an important role in the evolution of Duck Commander, and we still do today. If you take the onions or sausage out of Phil’s gumbo, it’s not going to taste nearly as good. And if you were to take Alan, Jase, Jep, or Uncle Si out of Duck Commander, the company wouldn’t be as good as it is today.

Korie:
The entire business was run out of the Robertsons’ house. When Willie and I were dating, every time I went to their house, I was folding boxes. Phil is very charismatic and people love to be around him, and he learned pretty early that if you were willing to feed people, they were usually willing to work. Kay and Phil often had big fish fries at their house, and they would usually turn into packaging parties. People would call their house from stores to place orders. People from Wisconsin would call to buy one or two duck calls. When Willie was a little kid, he was answering the phone, taking orders. Customers called at all hours of the day. Willie answered the phone and always said: “Duck Commander, can I help you?” It was usually somebody in Texas or California wanting a duck call. Willie grabbed a napkin or paper plate and wrote down the order. There was always a big stack of paper plates or napkins sitting on the counter with orders written on them. The next day, Kay got the orders together and shipped them out at the post office.

I get asked this question a lot: why do Willie and Jase call their parents by their first names? I’ve asked Willie and he doesn’t even know the answer, but we think it is because growing up when the business was being run out of their home, they would have to take these business calls for stores and orders on their home phone. The boys began referring to them as Phil and Kay in the business conversations and it just stuck. Jep, the youngest, didn’t work as much in the family business as a kid, because he was born so much later and by that time they had more employees to take the phone calls, and he still calls them Mom and Dad. So that’s our theory as to why Jase and Willie call them Phil and Kay. I can assure you it is not a sign of disrespect.

With a finished product, Phil hit the road in a blue and white Ford Fairlane 500 that once belonged to Kay’s grandmother—Nanny. Phil liked to call the trips his “loop,” and he was usually gone for about a week. With his calls stacked in the backseat and the trunk, Phil made a big circle around southern Arkansas, East Texas, West Mississippi, and into all parts of Louisiana, selling his duck calls at any sporting goods store or hunting shop he could find. He sold his first duck calls to Gene Lutz of Gene’s Sporting Goods Store in Monroe.

In Lake Charles, Louisiana, Phil met Alan Earhart, who had been making the Cajun Game Call for years. Earhart liked Phil and agreed to make two thousand Duck Commander calls for him at the price of two dollars each. Phil would still cut the
reeds and put the calls together, blowing each one before it went out the door, but Earhart cut the barrels. Phil figured if Earhart could handle a part of the manufacturing for a while, he would have more time to concentrate on sales calls and spreading the Duck Commander name.

Phil sold about $8,000 worth of Duck Commander calls in the first year. By the second year, his sales increased to $13,000; they rose to $22,000 in the third. By the fourth year, Duck Commander grossed about $35,000.

About five years into running Duck Commander, Phil realized many of his longtime customers were going out of business. There was a new superstore chain called Wal-Mart (as it was spelled then) moving into a lot of towns in Arkansas and Louisiana. As soon as a Wal-Mart store went up, a sporting goods or hardware store closed its doors a few months later. Phil realized that if Duck Commander was going to survive, he had to figure out a way to get his duck calls into this new chain. After initially being told that he had to go through Wal-Mart’s corporate office, Phil persuaded a local store manager to buy six of his duck calls. He took the Wal-Mart sales order to the next Wal-Mart down the road and showed the manager what the other store had bought, and there he sold a dozen more. Eventually, Phil was selling $25,000 worth of duck calls to Wal-Mart alone, selling to them one store at a time, and his business was starting to expand.

One day, Phil got a call from one of Wal-Mart’s executives.

“How did you get your product in our stores?” the man asked.

“Store to store,” Phil told him.

“Well, you have to go through me,” the man said. “I’m the buyer.”

Somehow, Phil won over the buyer and the man sent him an authorization letter, which allowed him to sell his duck calls to any Wal-Mart store that wanted them. The next year, Phil even persuaded the buyer to purchase bulk orders of Duck Commander calls to distribute to stores across the country. Eventually, Duck Commander was selling $500,000 worth of duck calls to Wal-Mart each year. Phil’s dream was beginning to come true.

Phil was a pioneer because he wasn’t afraid to take risks. I don’t think anyone ever quite understood what he was doing. But Phil was very self-confident and believed in his dream. He was a real showman and when he took his calls on the road, he was a great salesman. When he started the business, Phil actually carried an audio recording of live mallard ducks. He played the tape and then blew his call, which convinced customers that his calls truly sounded exactly like a duck, thus were the best on the market.