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

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. “Youmean 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 toWalmart 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 neverwould 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