When I was arranging to meet up with Kevin Duck of DuckyWorld Products, Inc., the maker of Yeowww! Catnip and Yeowww! Catnip Toys, he warned me in an email that “dress is casual as we have dogs there too.” I skipped putting on a tie when I visited DuckyWorld in the industrial side of Minneapolis’ Como neighborhood nested in a group of buildings where Cherrios were apparently invented. It’s now shared by filmmakers, glass artists, toner recyclers, researchers and one of the biggest cat toy operations in the country.
Walking through the entry and up a flight of stairs the powerful smell of catnip was unavoidable and I wondered how the other businesses here felt about it. I walked to their windowless door, paused for a second and it spontaneously opened with Kevin Duck on the other side. “I was just about to knock,” I said and he closed it again partially so I could. While explaining he was leaving to meet me outside he started to show me around wearing a thick brown shirt, grey slicked-back hair and carrying around a half-eaten banana.
Passing through their front office and then the narrow isles between shelves and bags of cat toys we reach the back where there was literally three tons of organic catnip sealed on shipping pallets looking as if they came off the set of a film about drug trafficking. I joked with a slight cough if his growers grew anything else. “They are from the northwest,” he quipped without a beat but said he was fairly sure they weren’t growing anything illegally. “But the UPS guy gives me crap about it.”
We sat at a small table and I asked him the question that turned a twenty-minute visit into two hours: “So how did you get into this?”
“I’ve done everything else and I didn’t like it” is his simple answer. Duck’s gone through a number of professions including sharpening skates for professional hockey and being a production assistant in films but he told me a story of working in concert production. Mixed with bits about working with the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd he cuts to the chase: “I got out after the fifth EdgeFest.” Referring to the wild (and sometimes muddy) yearly music festival in the mid-1990s, his final occupational problem in the music industry came from following the orders of Joey Ramone. The quick version: Ramone was waiting for Collective Soul to finish their set and asked Duck to have the stage a certain way. Duck, doing the bidding of Joey Ramone (who wouldn’t?) starts working on this when all is said and done, the entire band of Collective Soul surrounds Duck and aggressively interrogates him. It was one of those cases where a new band thinks they’re big now and can do anything they want. The quote Duck said to them was something on the terms of “so in the middle of your only hit you’ve ever had…” and he goes right in to explaining to me that he’s a black belt in Chin Mu Kwan Taekwon-Do and tells how to then get out of that situation without getting hurt. Anyway, it was the last straw for him and he quit.
Duck then went into creating inexpensive and disposable dog beds. He started recycling burlap coffee bags as his base material and the “Capoochino Pet Beds” became an unexpected hit with hunters (and their dogs). He ditched the project after the industrial bailer he had access to caused a shipment of his pet beds to explode in a UPS truck and subsequently couldn’t find an efficient method to ship them anymore.
After briefly considering getting into pet food and treats and seeing how difficult of a business it was to get into he decided to sell catnip… organic, high-quality catnip. In the mid-to-late 1990s, organic catnip was essentially unheard of and he believed that once people gave their cats the high-grade stuff instead of the many types of catnip that were then sold, they wouldn’t ever go back.
He started with a single shipment of 25 pounds and bagged them into half ounce, one ounce and two ounce bags. He printed labels on his inkjet printer and sold bags of catnip to stores, many times with his own handmade displays for them to be sold from. He was right: cats (and their owners) loved it and the organic catnip sold fast. Even though it was a good idea and a success for stores, selling bags of catnip wasn’t something that turned a lot of money around for him. Like the rest of his professional life, it “wasn’t about the money” but more about doing the right thing, doing something fun and delivering a good product.
While Duck’s organic catnip sales took off he “noticed all the catnip toys out there sucked.” He described toys on the market that were filled with a cotton stuffing and the catnip inside them being “toy grade.” That and most of them were too small: “cats love to bunny-kick,” he reminded me as I pictured my cat rolling around grabbing and bunny-kicking a small blanket. These ideas inspired his first catnip toy, the Yeowww! Cigar. Seven inches long, brown, completely packed with organic catnip and no filler. At the time and as well as ten years later, this is an unusually high amount of catnip for a single cat toy, regardless of the grade. Cats, naturally, loved these and in many cases getting a toy like this was unlike anything they’ve had before. These toys became a hit in Minneapolis and around the region.
After a couple stories from people stepping on a saliva-soaked cigar in the middle of the night and as Duck put it, “thinking they had stepped in some poop,” he was asked, “can you come up with anything brighter?” He made the Yeowww! Banana, a bright, yellow banana-shaped and banana-sized catnip toy, again packed fully with organic catnip. It’s an obnoxious amount of catnip for a toy and has more catnip in it than if you were to buy a small bag of catnip alone. I asked him about the design choice and he admitted that “cats don’t eat bananas. So it doesn’t make much sense but they don’t smoke cigars either.”
Cats love them. For an example, this is a typical reaction to these bananas found on YouTube:
DuckyWorld now has a wide product line, works directly with a few private catnip farmers and claims to have “the best organically grown catnip in the world.” (and Duck still personally inspects all the catnip as it comes in.) They sell to stores in every state and more recently all over the world. Yeowww! Catnip’s zany style has become a hit in stores and Duck shared a few stories about this, one of which included a quote from a distributor, “we need your brand.” Speaking of, the Yeowww! brand is so much of Duck’s personality and style that he even has his illustrator use him as the model for the crazy cat expressions on their packaging and literature. I had to ask again if that was really true and he said, “yes, I pose as the cat and he draws it.”
Duck and his wife have two cats despite him finding out he is actually allergic to cats. He can’t get rid of them. “I just love ‘em,” he said while slowly swooning his head. These days his cats are playing with a new cat toy he’s developing. I prodded for details but he kept insisting the new toy is “top secret.” He did mention that they’re many times up playing with it all through the night. I figure, for the cats that live with the guy whom many claim creates the best cat toys in the world, this is probably a high compliment.
Looking through my notes, I realized that one of the best ways to sum up the the personality of Kevin Duck and Yeowww! Catnip toys was actually in his email signature. It’s a slightly modified quote at the bottom of every email I exchanged with him: “LIFE should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, Chardonnay in one hand — strawberries in the other — body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming… YEOWWW! WHAT A RIDE!”
Kevin Duck and his products are on that ride if your cat is anything like mine, with a Yeowww! catnip toy it’ll be worn out and screaming too.
