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

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 andtold 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