Duck Head
Encyclopedia
Brand
The American Marketing Association defines a brand as a "Name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller's good or service as distinct from those of other sellers."...
name for clothing
Clothing
Clothing refers to any covering for the human body that is worn. The wearing of clothing is exclusively a human characteristic and is a feature of nearly all human societies...
and shoes in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
. First registered as a trademark
Trademark
A trademark, trade mark, or trade-mark is a distinctive sign or indicator used by an individual, business organization, or other legal entity to identify that the products or services to consumers with which the trademark appears originate from a unique source, and to distinguish its products or...
in the late 19th century, the name has been used by several different manufacturers and retailers of apparel, primarily in the southern United States
Southern United States
The Southern United States—commonly referred to as the American South, Dixie, or simply the South—constitutes a large distinctive area in the southeastern and south-central United States...
. Duck Head apparel had a period of great popularity in the 1980s and early 1990s.
O'Bryan Manufacturing
The Duck Head brand was founded in 1865 in Nashville, TennesseeNashville, Tennessee
Nashville is the capital of the U.S. state of Tennessee and the county seat of Davidson County. It is located on the Cumberland River in Davidson County, in the north-central part of the state. The city is a center for the health care, publishing, banking and transportation industries, and is home...
by George and Joe O'Bryan, two brothers who were buying surplus U.S. Army tent material. The material was a heavy canvas
Canvas
Canvas is an extremely heavy-duty plain-woven fabric used for making sails, tents, marquees, backpacks, and other items for which sturdiness is required. It is also popularly used by artists as a painting surface, typically stretched across a wooden frame...
known as "duck", and the brothers began making work pants and shirts out of the strong material. Their company became known as the O’Bryan Brothers Manufacturing Company. The brothers sought to register the name "Duck" as a trademark
Trademark
A trademark, trade mark, or trade-mark is a distinctive sign or indicator used by an individual, business organization, or other legal entity to identify that the products or services to consumers with which the trademark appears originate from a unique source, and to distinguish its products or...
in 1892, but the U.S. Trademark Registration Office
United States Patent and Trademark Office
The United States Patent and Trademark Office is an agency in the United States Department of Commerce that issues patents to inventors and businesses for their inventions, and trademark registration for product and intellectual property identification.The USPTO is based in Alexandria, Virginia,...
rejected their application because the term was in general use. They registered the trademark "Duck Head" instead. The company operated into the late 20th century, producing work clothing such as overalls and denim
Denim
Denim is a rugged cotton twill textile, in which the weft passes under two or more warp threads. This produces the familiar diagonal ribbing identifiable on the reverse of the fabric, which distinguishes denim from cotton duck. Denim has been in American usage since the late 18th century...
jackets under the Duck Head brand.
In 1978, David Baseheart, the O'Bryan Company's young,energetic sales director, developed an idea that quickly converted Duck Head into a fashionable brand. Baseheart fashioned a shipment of cotton khaki
Khaki
This article is about the fabric. For the color, see Khaki . Kaki, another name for the persimmon, is often misspelled "Khaki".Khaki is a type of fabric or the color of such fabric...
fabric into work pants, applied the mallard
Mallard
The Mallard , or Wild Duck , is a dabbling duck which breeds throughout the temperate and subtropical Americas, Europe, Asia, and North Africa, and has been introduced to New Zealand and Australia....
logo to a bright yellow tag on the back of the pants, and went on the road to sell them, visiting first the University of Mississippi
University of Mississippi
The University of Mississippi, also known as Ole Miss, is a public, coeducational research university located in Oxford, Mississippi. Founded in 1844, the school is composed of the main campus in Oxford, four branch campuses located in Booneville, Grenada, Tupelo, and Southaven as well as the...
campus bookstore where he sold his first batch of the new Duck Head khakis. The pants sold out quickly, and a new southern U.S. trend was born. Soon, and throughout the 1980s, Duck Head khakis were standard in Southern fashion, leading a writer for Forbes magazine to observe some years later: "For a preppy southern college guy in the 1980s, Duck Head Apparel khakis were as indispensable as a pair of worn Topsiders and a pink Polo shirt."
Delta Woodside Industries and Tropical Sportswear International
Baseheart bought the O'Bryan Company in 1985. In 1989, the brand was purchased by Delta Woodside Industries in an attempt to create a national brand. The Duck Head brand was very successful for Delta Woodside in the early 1990s. The Duck Head product line had been limited to casual cottonCotton
Cotton is a soft, fluffy staple fiber that grows in a boll, or protective capsule, around the seeds of cotton plants of the genus Gossypium. The fiber is almost pure cellulose. The botanical purpose of cotton fiber is to aid in seed dispersal....
pants
Trousers
Trousers are an item of clothing worn on the lower part of the body from the waist to the ankles, covering both legs separately...
for men, but Delta Woodside expanded it by adding woven and knit shirt
Shirt
A shirt is a cloth garment for the upper body. Originally an undergarment worn exclusively by men, it has become, in American English, a catch-all term for almost any garment other than outerwear such as sweaters, coats, jackets, or undergarments such as bras, vests or base layers...
s, shorts
Shorts
Shorts are a bifurcated garment worn by both men and women over their pelvic area, circling the waist, and covering the upper part of the legs, sometimes extending down to or even below the knee, but not covering the entire length of the leg. They are called "shorts" because they are a shortened...
, and women's clothing to the Duck Head brand product line. During the company's 1992 fiscal year, gross sales revenue from Duck Head clothing totaled more than $130 million. In the following years, however, the brand's popularity declined and Delta Woodside experienced financial losses, and in 1999, the company spun off Duck Head Apparel in an attempt to save the company. Tropical Sportswear International bought the Duck Head Apparel company in 2001, but went bankrupt
Bankruptcy
Bankruptcy is a legal status of an insolvent person or an organisation, that is, one that cannot repay the debts owed to creditors. In most jurisdictions bankruptcy is imposed by a court order, often initiated by the debtor....
in 2005.
Shoes
Duck Head Shoes began being produced in the 1990s by Old Dominion Footwear of Madison Heights, VirginiaMadison Heights, Virginia
Madison Heights is a census-designated place in Amherst County, Virginia, United States. The population was 11,584 at the 2000 census. It is part of the Lynchburg Metropolitan Statistical Area.-Geography:...
.
Goody's Family Clothing
In 2003, Goody's Family ClothingGoody's Family Clothing
Goody's is a brand used for some clothing stores operated by Stage Stores, Inc., of Houston, Texas. It is a successor to Goody's Family Clothing, a chain of clothing retailers based in Knoxville, Tennessee...
purchased rights to the Duck Head clothing brand for $4.1 million and made it into a private label
Private label
Private label products or services are typically those manufactured or provided by one company for offer under another company's brand. Private label goods and services are available in a wide range of industries from food to cosmetics to web hosting...
brand, sold exclusively at Goody's stores. Sales of Duck Head branded clothing totaled more than $97 million in 2004, the last year when Goody's was a publicly traded company required to disclose financial information.
Current ownership
After Goody's underwent Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2008 and then liquidated and closed all of its stores under a Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing in 2009, the Duck Head brand was put up for sale by Streambank LLC. Streambank sold the brand at auctionAuction
An auction is a process of buying and selling goods or services by offering them up for bid, taking bids, and then selling the item to the highest bidder...
in 2009, for a reported price of $2.65 million. It was purchased by a business group headed by Virginia
Virginia
The Commonwealth of Virginia , is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Coast of the Southern United States. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" and sometimes the "Mother of Presidents" after the eight U.S. presidents born there...
retailer Ross Sternheimer, who outbid Perry Ellis International
Perry Ellis International
Perry Ellis International is an international marketer of clothing, offering a diverse portfolio of brands through multiple distribution channels; focusing mostly on sportswear and casual clothing for niche markets...
. The acquiring business established Duck Head USA, based in Richmond, Virginia
Richmond, Virginia
Richmond is the capital of the Commonwealth of Virginia, in the United States. It is an independent city and not part of any county. Richmond is the center of the Richmond Metropolitan Statistical Area and the Greater Richmond area...
, and announced plans to expand the Duck Head brand into a full line of men's, women's and children's apparel and accessories to be sold through various retailers.