Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Arkansas’ duck dynasty
Stuttgart bird-call firm thrives without TV spotlight.
STUTTGART — The huge popularity of the Robertson family’s A&E mega hit reality show Duck Dynasty has led to a retail boon for members of the bearded clan and their wives, who own a West Monroe, La.-based duck call business, Duck Commander. It’s hard to go into any store and not encounter T-shirts, mugs, books, and more plastered with images of brothers Phil and Si and Phil’s sons Jase, Willie and Jep.
Forget the goose that laid the golden egg; in the Robertsons’ realm, when it comes to fame and fortune, everything appears to be just ducky.
Meanwhile, about 170 miles north in Arkansas’ duck-laden, swampy marshlands of Stuttgart, John Stephens, 40, and his wife, Angie, 41, are also busy making and selling duck calls in their own business, RNT, Rich-N-Tone Duck Calls.
The Stephenses bought RNT in 1999 from its founder, Harry Milton “Butch” Richenback, who began the company 35 years ago and is widely known for his hand-cut duck calls.
Richenback, now 67, who has won the Junior World Champion, the World Champion, and the Champion of Champions duck calling contests, began the company in his garage. He did so in 1976 following the passing of his mentor, Chick Major, maker of the famed Dixie Mallard duck calls. During his youth,
Richenback spent time at Major’s shop watching and studying his work, learning the craft of making calls and the art of blowing them. Years later, he served as a mentor to John.
John says, “I grew up here in Stuttgart and would come to his shop and hang out there on the weekends and watch him make calls. I had some crazy idea I wanted to make duck calls when I grew up.
“But my parents didn’t want me doing it for a living, so I majored in landscape architecture instead.”
John and Angie, both Stuttgart natives, began dating in college while she was at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) at Oxford and he was attending Mississippi State University in Starkville. They moved to Hilton Head, S.C., where he began working but became disenchanted when he learned that to succeed, he would need to focus more on managing and selling projects than working out in the field.
The couple soon returned home to Stuttgart. By this time, Richenback’s heart ailments had increased to the point where he needed to sell RNT.
“I couldn’t handle the business anymore,” Richenback says. “By 2006, I needed and received a heart transplant.”
PASSING THE MANTLE
“I actually wanted to start my own company,” says John, a Junior World Champion and three-time World Champion duck caller, “but RNT had such a rich history here and I didn’t want to see it leave and not be a part of our community anymore.”
Today, Richenback still has an office at the company. A window looking out onto the business’s retail shop allows visitors to watch him tuning and repairing calls. He also holds clinics for six weeks each year in October and November, teaching elementary school students how to call.
He credits the Stephenses for the company’s expansion.
“They’ve been responsible for all the growth we’ve had here,” Richenback says. “They’ve done a real good job with it.”
When the Stephenses first bought RNT, it was in an 800-square-foot space behind the earlier location of Mack’s Prairie Wings on Michigan Street (U.S. 79).
“We stayed there for one year and then in 2000 built the original part of the building we now occupy and have since added on to it twice,” Angie says.
Inside the 20,000-squarefoot business on U.S. 63 North, next door to the world-renown Mack’s Prairie Wings, the couple and their 18 employees quietly toil in the shadows of the commercial omnipresence (however fleeting it may be) of the entertainment phenomenon better known as Duck
Dynasty.
The Robertsons may rule in the world of reality TV, but the Stephenses are excelling in a different type of reality.
“When it comes to making calls, you have big-time mass producers and then you have the hometown craftsmen,” John says.
RNT, considered a leading manufacturer of custom duck and goose calls, produces about 70,000 calls a year, 20,000 to 25,000 of them customized calls and the other 50,000 mass-produced ones under their Quackhead line.
“We’ve tried to keep the heritage of the traditional part of custom call making that Butch did but just make more of them,” John says. “We’ve kept the custom feel where you can get your call tuned but are doing it on a bigger scale, making different models of calls.”
He says the biggest challenge for the business, which sells their calls through Mack’s Prairie Wings, Bass Pro Shops and Cabela’s, isn’t selling them but instead producing them in a timely manner.
“Companies like Duck Commander sell more to places like Wal-Mart and superstores because their calls are mass produced and priced at $19.99 and under, ” John says, adding that RNT calls range from $ 40 to $ 155, with the company’s more inexpensive molded call, under the brand name Quackhead, selling for $24.99 and less.
DAY-TO-DAY REALITY
In RNT’s production area the calls are made in two basic parts — barrels and plastic inserts — before being assembled. Calls can be customized for hunters who want them to be quiet in timberland or louder in a rice field where there’s a lot of wind, Angie explains.
Other customization includes laser engraving. Some RNT customers order calls for marriage proposals printed with ‘Will you marry me?’ to which they’ve attached a ring, groomsmen’s gifts, baby announcements with the baby’s name and birth date on them (yes, pink and blue calls are available), school mascots, businesses, and more.
The barrels of the acrylic calls are polished, while the wooden ones are sanded and then coated with polyurethane to help protect the calls from cracking in the wet conditions in which they’ll be used.
“It’s still a very hands-on process even though we use the CNC computerized lathe,” Angie says of the giant machine.
Once turned, the calls are then tuned.
So what’s an average day like around the office? For John, it’s checking emails, returning phone calls, making his to-do list, spending a couple of hours working on new product ideas and dedicating the afternoon to making and tuning calls. Angie’s day includes handling the financial side of the business, working on payroll and accounts payable and receivable and occasionally helping in taking phone orders.
The couple’s son Reece, 14, competes in calling, went to Canada with his father two years ago to hunt, and has won two championships for his age range. Daughter Riley, 11, prefers dancing to hunting.
So would the Stephens family be game for a reality show’s cameras to follow them around?
“I don’t think we’d be interesting enough,” Angie says, laughing. “We’re just your average Southern family.”
And John, while he hunts every day of the season, doesn’t wear camouflage when he’s not hunting.
“He has some camo shorts from Old Navy,” Angie says. “But that’s about as close as he gets to that.”
Despite the differences, the Robertsons and the Stephenses also share some similarities. And, within their industry, their paths used to cross.
Before the Robertsons exploded in popularity on A&E with their reality show, they were previously featured on the series Benelli Presents Duck Commander and its spinoff, Buck Commander, a deer hunting show starring Willie Robertson, three Major League baseball players and two country musicians, which still airs on the Outdoor Channel.
“After we got into this industry, we knew Phil and Willie and Jase from when they sold calls at the same shows we went to. Even before they had the TV show, Duck Commander had a decent footprint,” he says, adding that they did well because of their videos.
“They sold more videos than calls; they made their money from the media side,” John says.
“Willie was smart enough to see that there was a market for his Louisiana family.” Angie adds, with John agreeing, “They found a niche for them to make a real good living.”
In terms of duck call sales, the two companies have historically been pretty similar. Company information found online from Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp. lists both of them as having 15 employees and estimated annual revenues of about $2 million.
But, thanks to their reality TV show, the Robertsons’ Duck Commander business sold more than 1 million calls in 2013, raising their estimated annual revenues to $2.7 million. But that’s a drop in the bucket compared with their Duck Dynasty product tie-ins, which, by the end of last year, totaled $400 million in revenues, according to Forbes. Sales in Wal-Mart stores alone make up half of that, with some of those stores devoting entire aisles to Robertson-theme products.
“It’s crazy, isn’t it?” John marvels.
BIRDS OF A FEATHER?
Like the Robertsons, the Stephenses also have a TV show. But theirs, an outdoors program, RNT-V, now in its eighth season on the Sportsman’s Channel and the Wild Network, is more rooted in reality. The show, presented by Mack’s Prairie Wings, features 13 episodes each season, spotlighting hunters out in the field. It’s filmed and edited in-house by producer Jim Ronquest, who travels with the ducks across the nation and into Canada in search of waterfowl. And their weekly webisode, Inside Out (available at rntcalls.com), offers a behind-the-scenes look at what it’s like to run a waterfowl-related business.
RNT also has their own line of products on their website and in a small shop within their business. While there’s no sign of a Chia Pet (even though John sports a beard and long hair), there are duck and goose calls, DVDs of their show’s episodes, assorted apparel (even a shirt for ladies declaring “Call me sometime”), posters, prints, can koozies, RNT- emblazoned tumblers and money clips.
John says he has never watched Duck Dynasty, not even one episode: “I see enough of the duck call shop at the business,” he says, explaining that reality shows just don’t interest him. Instead, when he watches TV, it’s usually sports, hunting, or the news.
But another member of the family has had an interest in the show.
“Once, when Reece was 12 or 13, he was watching TV in the playroom and when I came in, he hit the remote real quick,” John recalls. “I asked him what he was watching and he quickly said, ‘Nothing.’ Worried that he maybe he was watching something inappropriate, I hit the button to return to the station. It was Duck Dynasty,” he recalls, laughing.
John believes his own business has benefited from the show.
“It has brought more awareness to hunting and our profession — the craft of making calls,” he says, adding that the show has brought call-making into the mainstream and even glamorized the industry, which includes more than a half-dozen other custom call makers around Arkansas.
“Used to, when I’d tell people I make duck calls, they’d look at me funny; now they say, ‘Oh, you’re like the Duck Dynasty guys,’” he says.
If offered, would the couple consider joining the Robertsons in the land of reality shows?
“If we did, we would want to put more focus on what we do and promote the artistry of our business; it would need to be more about the craft of our business,” John says.
Angie adds with a laugh, “John’s mother has asked us, why don’t we have a show like Duck Dynasty?”