But further problems lay ahead of me at home. I had planned to put the lathe in a small building on my property that I was using for a shop. It measured about twelve feet by twelve feet. When I arrived with the men I’d gotten to drive the truck home and help unload, one man looked at the building dubiously and said, “It’s not going in there—not through that door.”
I said, “Oh yeah, it’ll go in there.” I got out my chain saw and stuck the snout of it into the north wall and went to cutting. Whannnnnnnn! I was cutting through nails and everything. They were all just standing back, looking at me like they were witnessing the Texas Chain Saw Massacre. I kept at it. Whannnnnnnn! When I finished cutting my way to the top of both sides, ka-whooom! The whole wall fell out!
I backed the truck up to the shed, dropped the dump gate, and hooked one end of a come-along to the lathe and the other end to a tree. I dragged the heavy iron machine inside the shop. It filled the available space from end to end, leaving just enough room in front of it for an operator. We set the wall back in place and nailed it up. All in all, it was a successful operation. It’s amazing what a little redneck engineering can do!
I anchored the lathe down, leaving it on the original shipping skids. It operated that way as long as it was in use. The equipment was so heavy that, within a couple of years, its weight caused the shop to sink a foot into the ground. But the lathe remained relatively level as it sank, so its operation wasn’t affected. Nothing was ever done about releveling the shop.
By now it was dark outside. It had been a long day. Despite all the setbacks, I had overcome my obstacles and was exultant. The factory to make the duck calls wasn’t operating yet, but everything was in place.
I was so excited about our future that I went down the hill to see Pa and Granny. They were seated at the table, playing dominoes with Alan and Jase—they played dominoes together nearly every night. Pa believed in playing dominoes with children because it taught them to add rapidly and develop strategy, thinking several moves ahead. Whether the dominoes did that or not, all the boys did well in mathematics and the rest of their school subjects.
Now, I told y’all I talk pretty dramatically when the situation warrants it, and this was maybe the biggest day of my life. I walked into my parents’ house and announced to everyone, “Y’all see this duck call right here?”
I was holding the call John Spurgeon Powell built for me. Of course, they all stopped and were looking at me.
“I’m in the process of getting these duplicated on that equipment out there,” I told them. “Read my lips: we’re going to sell a million dollars’ worth of these things before it’s over.”
Pa was sitting there—and they’re all still looking at me. When I said we were going to sell a million dollars’ worth, they all looked back down at their dominoes. Pa picked one up, smacked it on the table, and said, “Ten!” He didn’t even acknowledge what I’d said!
None of them said “Good night,” “That sounds great,” or anything! They just kept playing. I walked out, thinking to myself, Well, I didn’t get any of them fired up. And I thought, Well, maybe not a million dollars’ worth.
Sometimes I still think about telling Pa I was going to make a million dollars—and that his only response was to take a ten-count. Since that time, as it turned out, we have sold way more than that. Who would have believed me at the time?
Undaunted, I set to work the next day trying to get the lathe running. It was a harder task than I envisioned. Coupled with my and Pa’s lack of knowledge about running a lathe (Pa did show interest in the project once it got under way) was the fact that it came with no instruction manual on how to operate it.
I had never run a lathe, but I saw a button that said Start. It’s like Jase says: when you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s best to do it quickly! So I pressed the button, and that thing fired up. Good grief! There were big old belts spinning with no protection on them, and the whole thing was humming! I saw a big handle, and I wondered what would happen if I pulled it up. Whiiizzzzzz! All these blades and metal parts started moving. I said, “Whoa, whoa, now!” and shut her down. Remember what I said about on and off buttons? Fortunately, the lathe was old enough to still have them!
It’s like Jase says: when you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s best to do it quickly!
I had never seen such a thing before. I didn’t have a book. Nobody was there. I didn’t know how to set anything. So I just went a little bit at a time. The first thing I did was call some cat from the company that built it. When I started telling him what I was trying to do, he said, “Aw, naw, naw, man! You’ve got to have templates.”
“What?” I asked him.
“You’ve got to have some templates,” he repeated.
And then he started explaining what they were and how that thing worked. After that, it was trial and error to get everything working right. I hadn’t been sent any templates, or jigs as some call them, which are thin metal plates used as guides to cut wood accurately into the shape you want. So I acquired what we needed.
Let me tell you: we tore up some wood out there. You wouldn’t believe the pile of shavings and waste. But Pa and I were determined to make it work.
While we were getting the lathe lined up and figuring out how it worked, I came up with another idea. I decided that maybe I could get someone to build my duck calls for me so I could start selling them. At least there would still be some money coming in, while we figured out how to build our own.
I was already testing the market and had traveled to quite a few areas, including my old hometown of Vivian, as well as places in eastern Texas, southern Arkansas, western Mississippi, and as far away as the bayou parts of southern Louisiana. It was in Lake Charles, Louisiana, that I encountered Alan J. Earhart, who had been making the Cajun Game Call. It was an old duck call, and he had been building it for years. Earhart was sympathetic to my quest, so we made a deal from which both of us benefited.
Earhart agreed to build two thousand Duck Commanders at a price of two dollars each, while I was getting my equipment lined up. Earhart had his own lathe, and he switched it over to build my calls. Earhart said that of all the people he had met starting out in the duck-call business, he thought I had enough energy and drive to pull it off.
“But man,” he told me. “You’ve got a long way to go.”
I had no idea exactly how long it would take me to get Duck Commander to where it is today.
FAMILY BUSINESS
Rule No. 9 for Living Happy, Happy, Happy
It’s Cheaper to Hire Your Relatives (Unless You Don’t Like ’Em)
People ask me all the time about the early days of Duck Commander, when it was just Pa, Kay, the boys, and me trying to learn how to operate a heavy lathe and build duck calls in a small woodshop outside our home. I’m sure that at various times Kay and everyone else assumed I was crazy, and they were probably right.
Like my childhood, our company started from humble, humble beginnings. When we first started fishing the Ouachita River, it was so slow you might see two buzzards fighting over an inner tube! When we ran out of roadkill to bait our nets, the buzzards fought over anything else they could find! After we launched Duck Commander, our first year of sales totaled only eight thousand dollars. I told Kay, “I know I have a master’s degree, but I’m gonna stay the course on this one. I think this will work. If the Almighty is with us, it will work.” It was just like when I persuaded her to move out next to the river, so I could give up my teaching job to become a commercial fisherman. I told her then, “If you get me a place on the river, I’ll fish the river. I’ll be the smartest commercial fisherman out there.”
Of course, everybody laughed at us in the early days. People would come by our house and say, “Let me get this right: you have a master’s degree from Louisiana Tech University, you could’ve played professional football, but you turned that down so you could do what?”
I always told them that I was fishing the river and followi
ng 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 plannin
g 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.
Happy, Happy, Happy: My Life and Legacy as the Duck Commander Page 9