The Duck Commander Family

by Robertson, Willie

  I like to joke that the Robertson family and bad ideas go together like biscuits and jam. Every action in life begins with a decision, and unfortunately, we don’t always make the best ones. Indeed, we’ve made some bad decisions over the years, but we wouldn’t be where we are today without having taken some risks. Even when we faced tough times and what seemed like insurmountable odds, we persevered through our mistakes and landed on our feet again. We’ve always thought that if we did what was morally and ethically right, while continuing to steadfastly believe in what we were doing, we’d be okay in the end. More than anything else, Duck Commander is about building solid products, fostering relationships that last, and treating our employees like family. Well, most of us are family!

  I LIKE TO JOKE THAT THE ROBERTSON FAMILY AND BAD IDEAS GO TOGETHER LIKE BISCUITS AND JAM.

  Even after Korie and I took over Duck Commander in 2005, Phil was still the king. I didn’t immediately start making rogue decisions when I became CEO, and I wasn’t interested in changing the way we’d done business for the previous thirty-something years. I never thought, “I’m going to change this, and I don’t care what Phil thinks.” I always went to him for advice before making a big decision, and he still has a very influential voice in how we operate today. There’s a reason Duck Commander was already a solid business when I took it over, and it started with the foundation Phil built in the early days. We follow pretty simple business practices and we’ve stuck to them, even in turbulent times. Phil was determined to build his company with his family, and that’s something that’s really important to me as well. Unlike a lot of modern businessmen, Phil wasn’t going to let his career get in the way of his family. That’s an attribute pretty much anybody can respect and appreciate.

  Korie: Phil and Willie are so much alike. We went to a marriage seminar at our church one time, and Phil and Kay and Jase and Missy were there as well. Each of the couples took a personality test to see if their personalities were compatible. We all laughed because Phil and Willie scored high in the characteristics for having a dominant personality. They were almost identical in a lot of areas, but somewhat different in that Willie was high in the social category as well. I think Willie got that part of his personality from his mother.

  It’s funny because people look at the Robertsons and think Jase and Phil are just alike, and they are certainly similar in their love for ducks. But when we took the personality test, we saw that Jase’s personality is much more like his mother’s. So I guess it makes sense that Phil and Jase get along so well in the duck blind. They make a good team, just like Phil and Kay do at home. Kay has always said that Willie is a lot like Phil and even calls him “Phil Jr.” at times. While I wouldn’t go that far, I definitely see the similarities. They both have strong, charismatic personalities. They are both big-picture guys with big ideas and deep beliefs. Whatever either of them is doing in life, he does it all the way, and they are both very opinionated, which can sometimes be a challenge. Phil and Willie haven’t always been as close as they are now. As they grew, they recognized the attributes they have in common and learned to value one another’s differences and strengths. Willie says it couldn’t have happened until after he was thirty, though. He needed to grow up and mature, and Phil has gotten more relaxed as he’s gotten older. Willie loves to hunt with his dad and brothers, but there have been times when he’s had a hard time sitting in Phil’s blind. You can only have one leader in the duck blind, only one man who lines up the men and yells, “Cut ’em!” when it’s time to shoot. Willie and Phil have both always been leaders, whether it’s in the blind or in business.

  YOU CAN ONLY HAVE ONE LEADER IN THE DUCK BLIND.

  After I took over Duck Commander from Phil, not all of my decisions were popular. When we started Benelli Presents Duck Commander on the Outdoor Channel in 2009, while it was hugely successful and helped change hunting shows for the better, it was quite different for people who grew up watching our Duckmen videos. They were used to seeing Phil biting ducks’ heads and watching ducks fall from the sky in slow motion. Really, our hard-core fans were used to seeing us kill a lot of ducks. But the show on Outdoor Channel revealed a lot of the business side of Duck Commander as well, which gave viewers a behind-the-scenes look at the company and our operations. Some people really liked seeing those aspects of Duck Commander, but change is hard for some people and there were some hard-core fans who only wanted to see the Duckmen shooting ducks from a blind for an hour. I can certainly appreciate both sides of the argument.

  Korie: We started catching a little bit of flak from some of our longtime fans, and a lot of their criticism was aimed at Willie because he’d recently taken over the company. On the forums on our website, some people told us they liked the way the old videos were filmed and accused Willie of trying to ruin the company. They said Duck Commander was getting too corporate and too big, and it was all Willie’s fault. After a while, I’d had enough. I couldn’t stand it any longer. People didn’t realize that Willie was trying to make Duck Commander financially solvent, and with the TV show, he was appealing to a much broader audience. In the old days, Phil made just enough money to pay the bills and feed his family.

  But as Jase, Willie, and Jep got older and started working for the company, there were a lot more families to feed. Each of the Robertson boys had his own wife and children to provide for. There are a lot of other Duck Commander employees to pay as well, and most of them are our relatives and very close friends. Willie had to find ways to increase Duck Commander’s revenue, or we were going to have to start laying people off, which we certainly didn’t want to do. Putting a Duck Commander hunting show on the Outdoor Channel was one of the best decisions we made. We got new sponsors who were paying us money to wear and use their products, and, of course, there were contractual obligations that came with those agreements.

  After I’d read enough of the complaints, I wrote a blog entry on our website entitled “Stand by Your Man.” I explained to the disgruntled fans that Willie was only trying to make Duck Commander better, and that without the changes he made they wouldn’t be able to see Phil, Jase, and Si shooting ducks anywhere, because there wouldn’t be enough money to produce the DVDs. Willie wasn’t out to change the core of what Duck Commander was. After all, he’s Phil’s son, so it’s his heritage as well. He was just trying to expand the company and grow it into something even more people could appreciate and love. To this day, we still make the hunting DVDs for the serious duck hunters just like we did in the old days. I think people slowly started to realize that Duck Commander was really a business and it had bills to pay and expenses like any other company. And after my diatribe, the fans who were complaining on our forums apologized for criticizing Willie and we all made up!

  Believe it or not, Phil has been making the hunting DVDs for more than two decades. The first ones were actually filmed on VHS tapes. Phil was convinced there was a market for waterfowl hunting videos when perhaps no one else was. There were a lot of deer- and other big-game-hunting videos on the market at the time, but no one had really tried it with ducks. Phil rented camera equipment from a company in Dallas and hired Gary Stephenson, a science teacher at Ouachita Christian School, to direct and film his first video. Much like Phil’s duck calls, not a lot of other people believed the videos would be a success. Duckmen 1: Duckmen of Louisiana was released in 1988 and sold about one hundred copies. Undeterred, Phil set out to film Duckmen 2: Point Blank, which took the next five seasons to produce. Obviously, it was a very laborious venture and none of the Duckmen knew much of anything about filmmaking.

  Like almost everything else Phil put his hands on, the Duckmen hunting tapes were unlike what everyone else was doing at the time. The videos lasted about an hour each and were among the first to include rock music over hunting scenes. Phil has always been a big fan of classic rock. He loves Lynyrd Skynyrd, Led Zeppelin, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Pink Floyd, and Bob Seger. I still remember when Pink Floyd’s The Wall came out in 1
979. Phil bought the eight-track and plugged it in Alan’s player, and then he just lay in the bed and listened to the entire tape. Lynyrd Skynyrd is definitely one of his favorites, though.

  LYNYRD SKYNYRD IS DEFINITELY ONE OF PHIL’S FAVORITES.

  If there’s one rule at Phil’s house, it’s that you never wake him while he’s napping. It was a rule when I was a kid, and it’s still that way today. One day, one of the members of Lynyrd Skynyrd called the Duck Commander office, which at that time was Phil and Kay’s house, wanting to talk to Phil. I can’t remember who answered the phone at the time, but he or she wasn’t about to wake up Phil from his nap. Phil was so mad when he found out. He told us, “From this day forward, wake me up if the president of the United States or Lynyrd Skynyrd calls!”

  I grew up listening to classic rock but then started liking country music when I was in college. Phil couldn’t understand why I liked listening to it. While I was home from college for a break one time, a bunch of Phil’s buddies were over at his house, and Phil called me down and started making fun of me for listening to country music. He told me rock ’n’ roll was the only music worth listening to. I got mad, stormed out of the house, and said I was never coming back. I told you we were both opinionated! Of course, Phil listens to country music now.

  Rock music wasn’t the only thing different about the Duckmen videos. Phil, Jase, Si, and I have the long beards, and so did most of the other original Duckmen, Mac Owen, Dane Jennings, and Bill “Red Dawg” Phillips. Phillips was the first Duckman to paint his face. “Red Dawg” couldn’t grow a long beard. His beard was pitiful, so he figured he’d paint his face to look different than the rest of us. After a while, Phil figured out paint was the best way to camouflage our white faces from the ducks. After all, a man’s face stands out like a white surrender flag in a duck blind. Before too long, everyone in Phil’s blind was required to wear face paint. By the time Duckmen 3: In Yo’ Face came out in 1997, the videos had a pretty large cult following. There were a lot of funny and uncouth antics involved, like spitting contests, shooting water moccasins (a.k.a. congos or ol’ Jims, as Phil likes to call them), and picking the feathers off ducks. The hunting scenes were really kind of in your face and over the top. In Duckmen 2, Phil flipped a deer with a rifle shot, which the cameraman, Greg Eppinette, captured in slow motion. Phil became nearly as famous for flipping the deer as any of his duck hunting. There was definitely a shock value to the early Duckmen videos. We released our sixteenth Duckmen video in 2012, and they’re still very popular.

  As we began to grow and develop more relationships in the hunting industry, many people started telling us we should get our own TV show, but we really couldn’t figure out how it was going to make money. I did not know anything about the business side of hunting shows. I knew I had to learn everything I could about this venture before I jumped into it. I felt I had a good grasp on entertainment but needed to know the financial side, because one thing we didn’t have at that time was a lot of money. Duck Commander was still operating on a very tight budget.

  Most hunting shows are paid programming, so you have to buy the airtime from a network and sell the advertisements on your own. And most hunting shows don’t make money, but companies write it off as advertising. I didn’t feel like I had the money to invest in something like that at the time. But we knew we would have a really good product if we could ever do it, because Duck Commander had so many unique personalities.

  About this same time reality shows were really taking off. Korie liked watching reality TV, and we became convinced our family had what it took to venture into it. After seeing American Chopper, we were even more convinced our family could have its own show. People weren’t watching American Chopper because they loved motorcycles. The success of that show was due to the big personalities and the relationships between the dad and his sons. We knew we had that and then some!

  We caught a break when Steve Kramer, an in-house producer with Benelli Shotguns, went on a hunting trip to Arkansas with Phil, Jase, Jep, and me. Kramer watched how we interacted and listened to our stories about our antics in the duck blind. He had a background in reality TV and was producing commercials for Benelli. When we went to SHOT Show a couple of months later, Kramer called us into a meeting. He told us Benelli thought we could do a TV show and went over what he thought the show could be. It was exactly what Korie and I had been talking about! We just kept looking across the table at one another with smiles on our faces. We were very much on the same page with what Kramer was laying out creatively. But then we told him we couldn’t afford to produce a show. He said he thought Benelli would be willing to back it financially, although they would need me to help get other sponsors on board as well. Benelli would be willing to put its name on the show for advertising, even if it could not recoup the money it was going to invest. It didn’t happen right away, however. When we left the meeting, I said, “Let me try to talk Phil into doing it.” Kramer said, “We’ve got to work out the details with Steve McKelvain [Benelli’s vice president of marketing].” Almost a full year went by before cameras rolled.

  Kramer was our executive producer, and the show swept the Golden Moose Awards the first year, which are kind of like the Oscars for outdoor TV. Kramer brought a lot to the table, and the quality was different from anything else on outdoor TV. He was passionate about making the show the best it could be creatively and stylistically. Benelli produced the first two seasons of Duck Commander but then decided it couldn’t pay for the production costs anymore. It was a really expensive show to produce by hunting-show standards. By that time, though, we were able to take it on ourselves. We hired Warm Springs Productions, which had worked with us in season one, to produce season three.

  Phil was really never convinced that the show on Outdoor Channel would work. “Who’s gonna watch this?” he proclaimed. But I told Phil he had to trust me on the idea and that the move would help our business. He reluctantly agreed to do it, and from day one I worked very hard to make sure it would not be miserable for him. His reluctance gave me the motivation to make sure it was successful. Duck Commander’s sales grew, and the show gave the entire company a new spirit—a spirit of confidence. It was cool seeing the fans’ reactions to the episodes at hunting shows, signing autographs, and selling more products. But more than anything else, it was preparing us for something so much bigger.

  I TOLD PHIL HE HAD TO TRUST ME ON THE IDEA AND THAT THE MOVE WOULD HELP OUR BUSINESS. HE RELUCTANTLY AGREED.

  Now, the Lord works in mysterious ways for sure. In September 2010, we found an e-mail in one of the generic boxes at DuckCommander.com. It was from Scott Gurney, who owned Gurney Productions, a TV production company in Los Angeles. Gurney wrote that he knew of Duck Commander, watched our show on Outdoor Channel, and really thought we had what it takes to go to the next level. One of our employees called me and asked if he should call Gurney back. He forwarded me the e-mail and I took it from there. I called Scott and we talked for a few hours. He was a big thinker and got me really excited about what he thought we could do. At one point, Scott said, “Man, you get a show on a major network, you will sell T-shirts in Walmart.”

  “We already sell T-shirts in Walmart,” I told him.

  “Oh, yeah, I keep forgetting you guys have a big following,” Gurney told me.

  As we’re about to start our second season of Duck Dynasty on A&E, I get asked this question all the time: “How did you end up getting a show on a major network? How did they find you?” Everyone wants to know how you end up doing a reality TV show. Well, that’s how we did it. Most folks don’t do a show on a small network and then get discovered. But looking back, the experience we had on Outdoor Channel was invaluable. That’s where we learned our craft of making great TV. It was where we got a taste for fame, became prepared, and learned to focus. We witnessed the ins and outs of making television shows, and learned how to work on TV schedules, and, perhaps most important, saw what worked and what didn’t. Oh, did we learn!


  We didn’t know A&E would be where we would end up. We made a highlights video, or “sizzle reel,” as it’s called in Hollywood, and Gurney pitched it to the networks. It was well received by many of them, but Gurney called and said A&E was most interested. Our only experience with A&E up to this point had been an appearance on an episode of Billy the Exterminator the year before, when Billy and Ricky came to West Monroe to exterminate our duck blinds. As far as I know, that was the only time Billy and Ricky had to literally abort the mission! Our blind was full of snakes and, even worse for Ricky, wasps. Unfortunately, Ricky is allergic to wasps and got stung right on his nose. The producers called “Cut!” and rushed Ricky to the hospital! That was the end of our filming with A&E up to this point.

  Gurney told us that A&E wanted to do two episodes and if they liked them, they would pick up a full season. It wasn’t a guarantee. Initially, we had bigger offers from some other networks, but let’s face it, this was A&E we were talking about! And Gurney said that it was where we needed to be. We were still cautious, though. If A&E didn’t like the episodes, nothing would happen, so we didn’t tell too many people about the opportunity at first. We just kind of quietly made the episodes and waited to see what happened.

  Thankfully, A&E’s executives liked what they saw. The show turned out funnier than even we expected. When we watched it for the first time as a family, we laughed the entire way through. Phil even said, “Willie, you might be right. I think this could work.”