Happy, Happy, Happy: My Life and Legacy as the Duck Commander

by Phil Robertson

  Now, I can’t take credit for all the duck calls that Duck Commander has developed over the years. One time when my son Jase was hunting with me, he had a mallard hen call in one corner of his mouth and a whistle in the other and was blowing them at the same time. As Jase was blowing on both of them, a flight of gadwalls turned and came right down to our decoys. After we shot ’em, I asked Jase, “What were you doing down there? It sounded like a gadwall.”

  Jase had a mallard hen call in one corner of his mouth and a whistle in the other and was blowing them at the same time.

  “Why do you think they came down here?” Jase asked me. “They thought I was a gadwall.”

  As with the Mallard Drake Call, we were the first company to introduce a gadwall drake call. Gadwalls are about the same size as mallards, but there’s really nothing very distinctive about them. The male gadwall is gray-brown with a black patch at its tail, while the females are patterned with brown and buff. The male gadwall makes short, deep, reedy calls that sound like a burp; the females quack like mallards, but with a higher pitch. To call a gadwall, you give the call one tat every four seconds or so.

  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!”

  I told everyone, “From this day forward, wake me up if the president of the United States or Lynyrd Skynyrd calls!”

  More than anything else, the Duckmen videos put a face to our company. I had a long beard and so did most of the other original Duckmen—Mac Owen, Dane Jennings, and W. E. “Red Dawg” Phillips. Red Dawg was the first one to paint his face in the blind so the ducks wouldn’t see him. He couldn’t grow a long beard like the rest of us, so he figured he’d paint his face to look different. After a while, I figured out paint was the best way to camouflage our white faces from the ducks. Nothing stands out like a white surrender flag in a duck blind more than a white man’s face! Now everyone in my blind is required to wear face paint. People grew to love our DVDs; I think there was a shock factor involved, and people wanted to see what the crazy Cajuns in Louisiana would do next! In 2012, we released Resurrection: Duckmen 16.

  The hunting DVDs ended up being a lot like our duck calls—we didn’t hit a home run in our first at bat, but we kept going back up to the plate. Eventually, the hunting DVDs caught on and became popular enough to help Willie land us a show on Outdoor Channel, which led to even bigger things with Duck Dynasty on A&E. Even though Duck Commander faced difficult times and what seemed liked insurmountable obstacles, we stayed the course and never gave up. I’ve always believed that if we did what was morally and ethically right, while continuing to steadfastly believe in what we were doing, we’d end up okay in the end. As long as we gave our best, continued to build products we believed in, and never strayed from God’s purpose for us, I knew Duck Commander would find a way to persevere. It’s what the Robertson family has always seemed to do.

  REDNECK CAVIAR

  Rule No. 11 for Living Happy, Happy, Happy

  Suck the Head of a Crawfish (You’ll Want to Do It Again and Again)

  After living more than six decades on Earth, I have reached the conclusion that ducks are the most protected species on the planet. In the United States of America, ducks are the most protected and overly regulated entity in history. It’s amazing how many rules and regulations our government puts on duck hunters. (If you don’t believe me, check with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s website for all the up-to-date information.)

  To even hunt ducks, I have to begin on a precise day at an exact minute, which is pretty difficult for a man who has never even owned a watch! I can’t fire a shot until thirty minutes before the sun comes up, so I have to constantly look to see when the sun is going to rise and then deduct thirty minutes to determine when I can fire my first shot. Of course, the sunrise and sunset are constantly changing, depending on the rotation of Earth. But I always have to be aware of when the sun is going to come up because there might be a game warden sitting out there with a watch, waiting to write me an expensive ticket.

  The U.S. government also dictates that I can have only three shells in my shotgun at once, not four or five, which would be a lot more efficient. I also have to have a precise kind of metal shot in my shells. It can’t be lead; it has to be steel so it’s not harmful to the ducks or the environment.

  Where I live in eastern Louisiana, we are allowed to hunt ducks for sixty days each year. This past season, the first split of duck season started on November 17, 2012, and lasted sixteen days. After a two-week hiatus, duck hunting commenced again on December 15, 2012, and lasted forty-four days, until January 27. The government also tells me how many ducks I can kill—no more than six per day. But I also have to know what species of ducks I kill—I can’t shoot more than four mallards, two pintails, three wood ducks, etc.—and I have to know the sex of the ducks whose lives I’ve ended. If I wing a duck—shoot it down and cripple it, but don’t kill it—I have to make a reasonable attempt to find it or I’m in violation of federal law. I’m telling you: it’s the rule book of all rule books when it comes to duck hunting. Unborn babies don’t have as much protection in this country!

  Here’s the government’s most silly rule: if I have a good day in the blind and want to give my buddy or a neighbor a few ducks to eat for dinner, I can’t do it without documenting what I gave them. I have to write down my hunting license number, date of birth, legal name, physical address, and telephone number, and then specify how many ducks I’m giving them, what kind of ducks I’m giving them, and what sex of ducks I’m giving away. It’s just one thing after the other when it comes to duck hunting.

  Here’s another dilemma: the law says I can kill six ducks per day for sixty days in the Mississippi Flyway. I was never very good in math, but I believe that comes out to three hundred and sixty ducks per season. But another federal law says I can only have a maximum of twelve ducks in my possession at once. Okay, let’s see now, one law says if I start on opening day and kill six every day, I can shoot down three hundred and sixty ducks in a season. But the other law says I can’t have more than twelve in my deep
freezer, so the government apparently wants me to eat ’em as soon as I shoot ’em. Now, we like to eat duck more than most people, but the average duck weighs about one pound when it’s dressed. The government expects me to eat three hundred sixty pounds of duck in sixty days? What am I supposed to do with the ducks that I can’t eat? Feed them to my dogs?

  If I’m ever elected president of the United States—and you never know—the first thing I’m going to do is downsize the Department of the Interior. I don’t know of any politician who has ever said he would do that. I’d also make sure we have plenty of nesting ground for ducks, so I’d work with our friends in Canada, where most of the ducks are born. I’d take all the money we’re sending to the Middle East, where we’re trying to pay people to be our friends, and divert it to Canada and earmark it to help raise ducks. We don’t need to be sending money to the Middle East; too many of those people are mean. The Canadians are already our friends, and Canada would be number one on my list for foreign aid. So when I’m elected president, we’re going to lower taxes and make sure we give the Canadians truckloads of cash to raise mallard ducks. The American people are tired of pork-barrel spending; let’s spend some money on ducks!

  If I’m ever elected president of the United States—and you never know—the first thing I’m going to do is downsize the Department of the Interior.