Finding their calling Greene Co. teens finding success with duck call business
WAYNESBURG – Luke Pecjak and Walker Smith don’t want to be compared to the once-popular “Duck Dynasty” reality television show. The recent high school graduates from Greene County are all too happy living in their own reality making some noise with their newly formed duck call and hunting business.
Barely out of high school, Pecjak of Dilliner and Smith of Ruff Creek recently launched their Duck Team 3 company that manufactures and sells duck calls, goose calls, grunt calls for deer and paracord hunting lanyards.
“We had an idea this is what we wanted to do when we got older,” Pecjak said of their DT3 company.
The two friends met about five years ago while shooting with the Hunting Hills club near Dilliner.
The two 18-year-olds then honed their manufacturing skills in the machine shop at Greene County Career and Technology Center near Waynesburg, where Smith said they started “experimenting” making animal hunting calls. They made the first few calls out of steel, which had an unintended consequence.
“They sounded like a party horn,” Smith said with a chuckle.
They eventually started working with acrylics and exotic wood, such as cocobolo from Central America and black limba from Africa. In addition to catching the eye with their colorful patterns, the grunt calls that mimic male deer during the mating season create different pitches to simulate different aged deer.
“We haven’t perfected it yet,” Pecjak said. “We’re always trying to make it better.”
That’s a surprise to CTC Director Mark Krupa, an avid hunter who was impressed by how the calls work in extreme temperatures when other brands freeze up. He bought one “to be nice.”
“Then I bought six more,” Krupa said after seeing how well it worked in the wild.
Last year, an expert from Illinois came to help them tweak their design, but instead bought four when he heard the pitches. That gave them the confidence in March to take their newly minted business on the road to a trade show in Summersville, W.Va., where they nearly sold out their inventory. They also arrived with some new DT3 hats and T-shirts to make themselves and their company look as professional as possible.
“We didn’t want to look like a couple kids,” Pecjak said. “We wanted to look like we could hang with the best of them.”
They met other hunting-related businesses there and are now partnering with Lethal Addiction, which sells a deer attractant substance.
Katie Sleasman, their guidance counselor at CTC, also has been impressed by their work at the technical school and how it helped them to launch their company.
“They did this on their own,” Sleasman said. “They took their passion and skills they learned at the CTC and took it to the next level.”
Now that they have graduated from high school and the CTC program, they’re taking those skills to another level.
They’ve launched a Facebook site that can be found by searching for Duck Team 3 and are working to build a website to sell their product beyond the trade shows. Pecjak’s uncle in New Jersey helped them license their brand and set up the company. They even received a complimentary one-year membership to the Waynesburg Area Chamber of Commerce to encourage their growth and they hope to eventually sponsor a hunting show in the region.
Now they’re working with a wood lathe at Pecjak’s home, spending hours in the evening – in between working part-time jobs – to make the hunting calls to boost their inventory. It takes about 90 minutes to make one from a block of wood with the amount of drilling and sanding involved, but they’ve streamlined the process into an assembly line that can crank out up to 17 in a couple of hours.
Most are colorful with intricate designs.
“They gotta catch the eye,” Pecjak said. “There are a lot of companies out there. You gotta stand out.”
Both are heading to Westmoreland County Community College in Youngwood to continue improving their machinery skills, but they plan to continue growing their business. They want to ramp up production on their goose calls in August just in time for goose season the following month.
“I see it being a career,” Smith said. “When we get our name out for selling, I see it as a full-time job.”
Duck calls sell for between $40 and $50, while the grunt calls go for about $25. The more advanced goose calls go for $50 to $60.
“We want to do what the Robertons (on ‘Duck Dynasty’) used to do,” Smith said of that family’s Duck Commander business featured on the A&E television show. “Not the reality TV or the drama.”
Now that they’ve launched their company, the two teens have advice for other young adults ready to embark on their own journey in life.
“Know what you’re going to do and do it,” said Pecjak, who was the CTC’s senior speaker.
“A lot of kids have a dream,” Smith added. “You got to pursue it. This was our dream for a while.”