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By
Andrew Hartsock (LJWorld.com)
Monday, October 2, 2006
As
business models go, Kelly Beltz’s is particularly
ruinous.
First, he gets to know each customer
and learns the intended purpose of his product, He uses
only the finest, hand-picked natural materials, then labors
meticulously over the by-hand production.
When finally he is finished, Beltz
charges only a little more than the price of a mass-produced,
assembly-line alternative.
And when it comes to shipping, Beltz
often sends along a freebie, just so his product doesn’t
have to “travel alone.”
Whether the product is widgets, or,
in this case, duck and goose calls, it’s a model
fraught with economic pitfalls.
Good thing Beltz isn’t in it
for the money.
“The money’s cool,”
he said, “but I get the biggest kick out of knowing
at any given time, somewhere in the world, somebody is
using one of my calls.
“I’ve had offers to do
design work for a couple of call manufacturers. They like
my designs, like my innovative thoughts about things.
They ask if you’ll be willing to do this or this,
and I’m like, ‘Oh, no, I’m not really
into that.’ I don’t want to sound like some
Greenwich Village artsy guy. I like money as much as the
next guy. Hey, I’ve got three kids. But I look at
it as a practical form of art. I’ve always been
sort of a frustrated artist, and I can’t draw for
squat. This is one way to do some artsy stuff.”
So, Beltz will hand turn at most
200 custom calls a year in his Wichita garage, selling
them off his Web site, www.kellyskalls.com.
Please pardon him if he continually
refers to his pastime — his real job is at the post
office — as art instead of economics.
The Skinny
•
Kelly's Kalls are available online at www.kellyskalls.com.
• Wichitan Kelly Beltz makes three styles of duck
calls: Louisiana, Arkansas and Reelfoot, short- and
long-reed goose calls, as well as unique miniature calls.
• The calls range in cost from $30 up to $150
or more.
• Beltz says he spends at least two hours making
each call. Since he started in 2004, he has made between
300 and 350 individually numbered calls.
“There’s a manufacturer
right here that could make acrylic calls for me on a CNC
lathe that just spits ’em out the end,” Beltz
said. “I could make ’em all day long that
way if I wanted to and turn into a manufacturer. But I
don’t want to do that. That’s a whole ugly
world. If this turns into a real job, I’m done doing
this. The manufacturers can make the acrylic calls cheaper
than I can buy the wood, and they’re selling those
things for 150 bucks. But I think once you become a manufacturer,
the art goes out of it.
“And it’s hard to get
excited looking at a piece of acrylic: ‘Oh, look
at the plastic.’ … I let the wood tell me
where to go. Some of the wood is so beautiful, you don’t
want to go cutting it up. You just can’t replace
wood.”
In the beginning
Beltz said he made his first calls
as a kid. Legend has it, some of his mother’s broom
handles unwittingly provided the raw materials.
“They were very crude, to say
the least,” Beltz said. “I don’t think
my father ever let us take them out in the field with
us.”
Fast forward about four decades.
About three years ago, Beltz’s
father died, and Beltz inherited his father’s 1930s-era
wood lathe.
“I thought, what the heck can
I build with this,” he recalled. “I thought
about calls. I had collected ’em for years, but
I’d never tried making them. Unfortunately, there’s
no school to go to, no Duck Calls 101. Just looking at
the calls I had, I reverse-engineered some. They were
rather crude.”
Most of Beltz’s early calls
were gifts, but by November, 2004, he had a few listed
on eBay.
The following month, he was contacted
by a representative of the National Wild Turkey Federation
and invited to enter one of his calls in the NWTF’s
national call contest.
In February, 2005, Beltz took fifth
place in the matched-sets competition.
“I didn’t think
they were too whippy, so I was pretty jazzed about that,”
he said. “Maybe there were only five entries. But
things kind of went from there.”
In the field
Of course, a duck doesn’t care
what a call looks like. All the national awards —
Beltz also has a third-place award to his name; not bad
considering he has been doing this just under two years
— won’t attract a goose.
The sound’s the thing, and
Beltz knows it.
“All my calls are working calls,”
he said. “I make calls for hunters. If it doesn’t
sound good, they’re not going to buy it, and if
it’s any indication, I get a lot of repeat customers.”
One of them is Cecil Allbright, of
Dayton, Ohio, who has a half-dozen or so Kelly’s
Kalls. He also has given some away and has awarded more
as prizes at Ducks Unlimited functions.
“Their quality is just as good
as any of the calls I have,” Allbright said. “It’s
all about the personalization. He doesn’t mass-produce
them. And the sound … they’re actual working
calls.”
Allbright uses and collects calls,
and he’s happy both to use and show his Kelly’s
Kalls.
“Kelly’s call quality
is great,” he said. “Add to that the fact
I know who made them, know what kind of wood they are.
They’re collector quality. But since Kelly is still
alive, their value isn’t there yet.”
Pick your call
Beltz makes three styles of duck
calls: Louisiana, Arkansas and Reelfoot.
He also makes long- and short-reed
goose calls.
“My short-reed goose calls
sound as good as any short-reed goose call in the world,”
Beltz said. “I use the same guts as the top three
goose-call manufacturers. The only difference is, I’m
standing in my garage in front of a lathe. The first one
of theirs looks just like their 9,000th. The 10 I make
from now to December will be dif-
ferent from the 10 I make from December
to January.”
Beltz also makes unusual miniature
calls. About the size of a shotgun shell, the minis have
proven surprisingly popular.
Beltz invented the minis as a way
to hold his son’s Cub Scout kerchief.
“I made a couple for his pack
and thought, ‘Why not make an honest-to-God duck
call that small?’” Beltz said. “I made
some and took them to a gun show on a whim, and I got
wiped out. I had orders out the kazoo for those things.
Nobody else makes ’em. You can go to any sporting-goods
store, look on eBay, and never see one of those miniatures.”
Their size, Allbright said, belied
their sound.
“People are amazed,”
he said, “at the sound that comes out of them.”
“It blows people away,”
Beltz added. “People think they’re kinda cool,
pick ’em up. They look like a little toy thing.
What comes out is a full-fledged duck call. The first
time somebody picks one up and blows it … the look
on their face is priceless.”
Which brings us back to that business
model.
Beltz knows he could care less, crank
out more, settle.
He also knows he’s not about
to.
“I just enjoy doing it,”
he said. “There are a lot of things people do to
enjoy money, but hate what they do. I like what I do.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve made some decent
extra spending money.
“But it means as much to me
to get a call from Australia and hear my friend down there
bragging about giving one of my calls to his mates.
“That means as much to me as
the money.”
This article can be found online
at LJWorld.com
(Lawrence Journal)
Phone
# 316-259-4142 (9am-11pm CDT) --- kellyskalls@sbcglobal.net
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