Craig Wolfe is reshoring rubber ducks. He brought an industry back to the U.S. Not only is he bringing the production of rubber duckies back to American, he is bringing the rubber ducky back to where it was invented, the great state of Ohio.
Ten years of overseas production has been returned to America. The owner of CelebriDucks didn’t do this just because it made financial sense. It was not a question of price, or cost or delivery or bottom line thinking. Craig has a passion for bringing manufacturing back home. To him it is simply the right thing to do.
He believes offshoring is wrecking our economy and ruining the future for our kids. Craig thinks of it as a terrible nightmare and he is trying to wake up America. It is Craig’s mission to snap us out of it.
We get all of that. So we want it to stop. We want a do-over, big time. But do we really understand what it will take to bring all of these industries back to the U.S. Craig thinks not.
“It is like turning around the Titanic. You have set something in motion,” he explained. “Now everything the whole infrastructure, all of the skill sets, everything you had set up to do manufacturing in the past isn’t what it was.”
This complicates the mission. We have to do more than convince ourselves and corporate America that it would be wise to bring manufacturing back. We have to be ready when they agree.
“You have to put that all back together, along with delivery times and working with the type of speed and urgency that people overseas have gotten used to, that really is many ways is missing here,” Craig said.
The soft-rubber floating duck form was created in America. They were made in America. But, like so many of our manufacturing icons, we lost the rubber duck. “It’s sad,” said Craig. “This is an American art form, like jazz.”
When Craig started laying plans for bringing production of rubber ducks back to the U.S. he had to worry about things like the learning curve and the training cycle. Wait a minute. This is a rubber duck that floats in the bathtub. How hard can this be?
You would be surprised.
To begin with, they have to float. The resin has to be put into the body of the duck correctly. So much has to go in the top, just the right amount has to be placed in the bottom or the duck won’t float right. You don’t want to send out a flotilla of tipsy ducks. Then there are the thickness and molding issues. Most of the molds for the ducks weren’t made anywhere in the U.S. when Craig took on this challenge.
“You know what? I am dealing with some of the biggest plastics factories left in the U.S.,” he said. “This rubber duck is the most challenging thing they have probably ever done.”
The steepness of the learning curve that went along with the skill set needed by the people who were given the job of creating American-made rubber ducks turned out to be a real challenge. “We took on a lot of work thinking that the people would be able to learn this,” he explained. “What we learned was that we should have taken another two-to-three months to train these people before we took on any of these extra jobs.”
Learning curves don’t come cheap. “Oh, that is so right. Honestly, we probably hemorrhaged thousands and thousands (of dollars),” he groaned.
Craig has plenty of company in his misery over a lack of skilled manufacturing employees. If there is a common thread running through many of the conversations I had as part of the preparation of this book, it is that there just are not enough people who (A) want to work, and (B) have the skills that are needed in the workplace.
“You don’t even think about it. This is America. We are the manufacturing kingpins,” Craig said as he expressed his continued amazement with the lack of the skilled people he needed. “We have lost of a generation of skills.”
He pointed out that we still have people “who can do the big stuff.” Yet, the “devil is in the details” when it comes to high-quality manufacturing. Today’s manufacturing workforce, for the most part, is like a seventh-grade band filled with kids who play the notes but not the music.
Craig searched for people who were problem solvers, people with the engineering background to figure out how to get the rubber ducks out of molds and ovens in America. It was done one way in China. A new way had to be created in the U.S.
As Craig explained it, the smaller the item you make, the more intricate the manufacturing process becomes. Craig is still having trouble finding people with the skills to handle the “nuances” of that.
“Kids want to be a rock star or a venture capitalist,” complained Craig. “They don’t want to be a guy who works at a lathe or works as a machinist. But that is what America is built on. Once you give up manufacturing, you will lose your service industry too. One follows the other.”
Ever the optimist, as are most entrepreneurs by nature, Craig said that he, as his artists advised him to do, does look at the training time and money spent as an investment.
“At the end of the day, I can tell you this, and you can quote me, we will be the only company making rubber ducks in America.”
Well, they are making rubber ducks in America and CelebriDucks also launched the first rubber duck race in the U.S. involving only American-made ducks on Memorial Day 2012.
“So it has happened. But we are still far behind. I still can’t fill all of the orders,” he said. “Already we have to find new painters and new factories,” he said. “Once people got into it, they realized the costs are so exorbitant they had to re-cost everything to us.”
Advice from Craig to the reader: Even if you find the manufacturing to bring a product back to the U.S., spend some time in the R&D process with them, as much time as it takes to get a product that you are really happy with. “That way you will know what the real costs are and how difficult it really is to do it,” said Craig. “Before that, you are really just kind of speculating.”
As tough as this was, it has worked. As Craig said, they are making rubber ducks. They are selling, shipping and delivering rubber ducks. Even though his company isn’t huge by General Motors standards, when it comes to rubber ducks there aren’t many competitors who are bigger. This is the company people come to for rubber ducks when no one else can make a deadline.
“When Conan O’Brien was launching his show on the Turner Network and wanted Conan O’Brien ducks there for the opening and no one else could get the job done, they gave it to us,” said Craig. “Two days before the show opened, those ducks were sitting on his doorstep.”
Craig’s company is good. They have never missed a deadline. They are used to being good. Not just good. They are used to being among the best. “(Rubber ducks for) the Houston Rockets, New York Yankees, the Cubs; we have always been dead on. You know your options. You know your molding times. You know where you can cut things, where you can fly things in; you get a feeling for it when you have been in the business long enough.”
Mistakes were made. The journey has been arduous. Perhaps an entrepreneur has to fail first to succeed later.
“We were so used to ‘we can do anything’ that we didn’t really translate it into ‘when you are working in a whole other country, with a whole other cast of characters, you really have to make sure you have tested them,’” before you go into formal production and taking on work.
They didn’t do any of that. They had to rush. Mistakes were made. Expenses piled up. “Think of it,” he said. “Anytime you rush anything, you have excess Fed Ex charges. You are paying for overnight (shipping).”
If Craig had it to do all over again he would have done a much better job of laying the foundation and building trust with vendors, partners and customers before they went into full production.
“I should have said, ‘not yet, we really don’t have it all tested, yet,’” he said. “We had to eat a lot of the initial investment expenses. That was a big cost to us.”
In the long run, it is all going to work out. He is convinced of that if only because his customers are so thrilled to buy rubber ducks that are “made in America.”
Craig loves making products in America just as much. He was watching the TV show “Shark Tank” when an inventor who wanted to give jobs back to the people to his North Carolina hometown was advised to send his manufacturing overseas to lower costs. “I wanted to reach through that TV and…,” said Craig. “They are not entirely incorrect. But if everybody takes that point of view, you will destroy this country. Sometimes you have to do what is ethically correct.”
Craig was headquartered in California, when I spoke with him in 2012. However, his art department is headquartered in Cincinnati and he found the factories he needed in Ohio, “Where it all began.”
Buy Quenching The Thirst, an ebook to read the stories of the entrepreneurs building their own businesses with beer. It is available wherever ebooks are sold including Amazon, Barnes & Noble and iTunes.
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