Merging celebrities and rubber duckies works for Lake County’s CelebriDucks
Craig Wolfe is undaunted facing ideas that on their face seem to have no chance of success. One night at a party, about 20 years ago, a tipsy friend of his made a crazy proposal: what if we made rubber ducks that looked like celebrities?
“For some reason, I could actually envision it working,” Wolfe said. “I remembered one of my teachers telling me that anything is made funnier by adding a duck to it.”
Having founded a profitable business selling artwork depictions of some of the most beloved characters in advertising, such as the Pillsbury Doughboy, the Coke Bears and the Budweiser Frogs, Wolfe was experienced in promoting iconic pop culture images.
Through his company, Name That Toon, he worked with the likes of Coca-Cola, Anheuser-Bush, Campbell Soup and others, convincing them that people would hang framed art made from the animation cells and drawings of the characters they had created to represent their products.
To initiate the celebrity rubber ducky idea, Wolfe approached King Features to get the rights to Betty Boop.
“I’m sure they couldn’t wait for me to get off the phone,” he said of his first pitch. But after securing permission, Wolfe found someone overseas to make a prototype Betty that he sent to King’s head of licensing for North America. After weeks of persistent follow-up, sometime in 1997 Wolfe received the following message: “We received your little duck; it’s very cute. Let’s talk.”
And CelebriDucks was born.
A New Jersey native, Wolfe, 68, came to northern California in 1976 and has lived in Kelseyville in Lake County since 2018. There he runs his $10 million rubber duck company from his home with a stunning view of Clear Lake. “I have lived all over the world. Tropical islands, the south of France and in Del Mar, La Jolla, Tahoe — nothing compares to what I have in Lake County,” the entrepreneur said. “It is drop-dead gorgeous here.”
It was near the turn of the millennium that Wolfe’s new side project became his main endeavor. “I plugged away and sent out my little press releases all day long. My daughter Rebecca, a product design major, designed the entire line in the beginning,” he said.
Then one day, Atlantic City Press called for a story. That article was subsequently noticed by the vice president of the Philadelphia 76ers, an NBA franchise that was always on the lookout for cutting edge promotions. They challenged Wolfe’s company to make a rubber duck likeness of Allen Iverson, their superstar at the time.
Wolfe wondered if his artists could capture he basketball player’s intricate tattoos, cornrow hair style, and athletic build. “In spite of that, I replied with confidence, ‘of course we can do it!’ Ultimately I was able to joke that the duck looked more like Iverson than Iverson!”
The 76ers project was a smash success and led to CelebriDucks getting calls from other sports teams and corporations looking for unique and amusing giveaways, especially if the items could be customized. The New York Yankees and Chicago Cubs, as well as Gorton Seafood, were among the initial large clients
Wolfe sold his animation art business in 2002 and never looked back. From then on, his drive was toward constantly improving his product (the first ducks didn’t float well and were a bit too big and hard) and refining his vision.
The CelebriDucks business is based on continuous innovation and maintaining the distinction of being the top custom duck manufacturer in the world, not only for the intricate detail and design of the products, but also for the raw materials used.
History of the ducky
Rubber ducks were invented in America, as Wolfe tells it, at the Sieberling Latex Company in Ohio in 1933. An executive of that company, which also spawned Goodyear Tire & Rubber, happened to watch Walt Disney’s “Three Little Pigs” at a local theater, and was inspired to acquire the rights to produce rubber figurines of the Disney characters. These eventually included the first rubber Donald Duck.
Most rubber duck manufacturing has vanished from the United States, but Wolfe has been working hard to bring at least a portion of the industry back to this country.
“Since I own the company 100%, I didn’t have to please investors and guarantee shareholder profits when I decided to make some of our ducks completely in America.”
The entire CelebriDucks line is designed and sculpted in Ohio, in a serendipitous return to the rubber duck’s birthplace. Wolfe said he would like to manufacture all of his products stateside, but the original and custom ducks are so detailed and complex that they need to be finished elsewhere. Only the simply sculpted ducks for babies are manufactured in Michigan.
