What's new at CelebriDucks

Friday, October 18, 2013

I decided to take our foreign competition head on by becoming the only one in our industry making our products in the USA!  I have a very unique company here.  Noone did licensed rubber ducks and the intricacy in the sculpting and painting we offered was unheard of.  We ended up selling over a million ducks and creating a whole new company that does a line of celebrity rubber ducks that were voted one of the top 100 gifts by Entertainment Weekly and featured on hundreds of TV shows, magainzes, and newspapers including The Tonight Show.  I'll post our press kit letter below.

But over time, I also wanted to do something right and make some kind of difference in the lives of people here in America.  I got so tired of seeing the loss of jobs and industries in America and everything being outsourced. It was very sad to see so many Americans losing their jobs.  I saw companies unwilling to take the risk of bringing their manufacturing back here.  For me, it was very important to bring a whole industry back to America. 

Thus, I finally decided that I had to do something. The rubber duck was actually invented in the USA.  Now every rubber duck was being made overseas.  We decided to bring the whole rubber duck industry back here and are now the only one making them in America once again! We're actually making them in New York City where as it turns out some of the first rubber ducks were invented in the 1800's!

You read a lot today about industry returning to America.  I really want to make something clear about this.  You might see bigger molded plastic parts and such coming back here and more robotics and so forth, but the small hand-painted toy industry which also uses rotational molding is virtually gone and is NOT easily coming back at all.   It is just too much hand work to do the painting of small toy like items plus with all the EPA regulations, most of the rotational molders could not survive.  Still, there are a few of us left and out of the ashes, in our own small way, we are helping to keep this industry alive.

In the Made in America section on our website you can read more about our story. I knew from the start that it would be a very expensive and big risk. But I never knew just how much the technical skills had been lost here and how much work it would take to get it all re-established.

I always joked that if I didn't own the company 100% I would have been fired.  There was no way I was "maximizing shareholder value" in the short run.  But I knew in the long run, it should put us in a fabulous position, as we would own our niche.  Noone else will ever try doing what we did and making rubber ducks in America...trust me!   We can also make shorter deadlines and do smaller production runs that our competition cannot.  And the quality and safety of our items is as good as it gets. Truth is a lot of people want things made in America, something our foreign competition obviously cannot duplicate!

In terms of other benefits, we now have companies from Harley-Davidson to The Future Farmers of America wanting us to make ducks made for them in America and we are getting national PR which has been wonderful for the company.  But apart from all that, it has been very emotionally rewarding doing this and all signs point to the fact that it is going to be very successful. 

I will say that without a doubt the most stressful and financially difficult venture I have ever taken on in my life.  That being said, sometimes you just have to do what is right and look at a bigger picture.  We chose to embrace change and never look back.....or as it says on the hang-tag on our new 100% made in America Pork Chopper biker duck...."live free, float free!"

Sincerely,

Craig Wolfe

President

CelebriDucks

415-456-3452

www.CelebriDucks.com 

CELEBRIDUCKS

28 Mountain View Ave., San Rafael, CA. 94901

Phone: 415-456-3452      Fax: 212-419-0992   www.celebriducks.com

CelebriDucks is the original creator of the first ever celebrity rubber ducks of the greatest icons of film, music, athletics, and history. They have produced CelebriDucks for the NBA, Major League Baseball, the NHL, NASCAR,  NCAA collegiate mascots and also famous people such as Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe, Barack Obama, The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, James Dean, KISS, James Brown, The Blues Brothers, Mr. T, Shakespeare, and the world’s first ever 100% recycled “Green” duck. To date they have created over 200 different CelebriDucks and have pioneered a whole new collectible. 

The company has received a tremendous amount of publicity having been on NBC, Fox, CBS Evening Magazine (three times), CNN, ABC, Showtime, ESPN, VH1, TNT, A&E, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, The Tony Danza Show, The Jimmy Kimmel Live show, and most other television networks, plus written up in Sports Illustrated, U.S. News and World Report, ESPN The Magazine, Maxim, The N.Y. Times, USA Today, LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Toronto Sun, Playboy, The Chicago Sun Times, Fortune Small Business, etc..  CelebriDucks have been on Jay Leno’s Tonight Show twice and were voted one of the top 100 Gifts by Entertainment Weekly. The press only continues to build with more and more stories coming out about the company both nationally and internationally.

The company created a Tropical Parrot, complete with Hawaiian shirt and shades, for The Jimmy Buffet Margaritaville Cafés, and successfully sell their Blues Brother’s ducks at all House of Blues venues nationwide. They also recently broke new ground by creating the world’s first ever floating Pink Flamingo which debuted at The Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas.