Original subtitles

No one was born to get up in the morning, pour themselves a cup of

themselves into the office, and then be like that little tiny cog

in a meaningless machine.

When you're doing something that solves a problem, it's way easier than just

doing something for the sake of doing it, because you can trick people into

buying it.

When you don't understand the meaning or the purpose of what you're doing,

you're kind of wasting your life.

Cycling is one of those things that even today I look at it and I'm like, why

would anyone want to do that?

Then I get out my bike and go for a ride. I'm like, oh yeah, it's a blind.

There's a rhythm to riding a bike and a feeling of moving and power and the wind

and seeing and you're just in your head. Some of the best ideas, some of the

best moments I've had have been riding my mountain bike and my road bike

I can just meditate.

Chopper is the most interesting man alive, but he'll never tell you that.

He is an ex -Olympian. He lives life the way that he wants to, and he creates a

vibe that people want to be around, which really defines, I think, our

and our company culture.

In 96, I got hired by Motorola as a pro, racing in Europe, and then made the

Olympic team in 96, and then went over and did that whole business. That really

wasn't my cup of tea.

It's not really a living.

As a professional athlete, it's tough to keep any balance. It's all about you.

And I had kids, and it's like you're traveling all the time, and you're so

-absorbed and self -centered. It really wasn't who I was.

Then Jake Peters and I kind of met, and he introduced me to this product he was

working on developing called Dex.

Well, I was the lead banker in a bunch of technology companies.

Every aspect of the Internet was in its infancy.

So it was all you could eat.

It was the ultimate opportunity to do banking work, merger work, take

public, raise private money for companies.

But you're not really building anything particularly meaningful.

You know, you just end up with this bunch of pieces of paper that says you

all these deals.

It was just a little WD -40 on the wheels of commerce.

It's not one of the gears.

It's not the engine.

It's not the chain drive.

It's just WD -40.

I just thought that there was more to it. I thought there was more to life

doing deals, so we moved here from Lexington, Mass., to Sun Valley, Idaho.

Some local guys and some guys in Park City let me know about this idea to

basically productize something that already existed.

People have been making drawer systems out of plywood for decades, 50 years

anyway.

But there really wasn't an affordable, well -made...

product that people find useful.

So the journey for Dec was simply, let's make life easier for the working man.

Because if we make life easy for the working man, it's going to work just

for the orthodontist and his or her golf clubs, right? But if we take that guy

who's getting dirty, who's got to climb in and out of the bed of the truck, and

his knees are sore, and he's reaching, and if we can make that person's life

easy, more ergonomic, then we win.

It took two and a half years to take the germ of the idea and turn it into an

actual product.

We were learning how to become manufacturers.

And after six months, we had this very substantial increase in the performance

of the product. We grew at a very high rate for the next 10 years.

Jake obviously started the company.

90 % of life is showing up. That's what he would always say.

really to him meant whether it was a customer reaching out about a complaint

that they had or a supplier that we were having a disagreement with.

Whatever the cause was, there was sort of no cause too small that wasn't worth

getting on a plane and going to see someone face -to -face. That's the way

build a business.

I left the company in the middle of 22 simply because the opportunity was this

big and I had this much left in the tank.

I got a call from a friend who said, you should meet this guy, he's your new

CEO. It was a few days before Christmas, and I met him, and I heard his story,

being responsible for the production of the camera on iPhones 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5,

and he was looking for work. I said, I think I've got a really good Christmas

present. This guy may be a good fit for us.

Talk to a lot of people, you know from Stanford Business School They're all

doing like big fancy jobs living in big cities and you know, it's awesome what

they've done and I tell them I Build parts for the back of pickup trucks and

they're like, where did you go wrong along the way?

Had a really interesting career in the sense like I've been able to work with a

lot of People who are at the absolute top of their game across multiple

industries at different time periods I started my career at Apple in 2007.

And I didn't know when I was interviewing, but I got put on the first

go build the camera. I was way too cocky in my 20s.

So I just, I did not like how the corporate world worked.

I thought I could do things better, which was very ignorant at the time.

Joined Amazon, you know.

Was used to working in kind of small, really fast organizations from my time

Square, my time at my tiny startup.

And loved the amount of resources that a company like that could bring to bear

and loved the speed of decision -making that happened at the top.

But I got pretty disenchanted with what was happening kind of in the middle.

And I had been through the startup thing and kind of stepped on every landmine

imaginable in that process and didn't love that experience. It was very

and, like, made me a pretty bad dad and a pretty bad husband.

I wasn't super, like, into that whole zero to one idea.

And so I was thinking, like, what opportunity can I find where it's like,

there's a company that's already proven that customers love the product, but,

like,

they just need to, like, pour gas on that fire.

A friend of mine from the Bay Area was in town actually interviewing to be the

CFO at DEC. I knew very little about the company other than I'd seen the trucks

driving around town because everyone has a sweet wrap on their truck.

And he came over after his interviews. He's like, you've got to meet these

And I was on the bench trying to figure out what to do next.

And I met Jake. He was like, what are you doing on the bench?

And I was like, I don't know. I really like living here.

I don't know what to do.

I was kind of going through a soul -searching moment.

He was like, hey, this is a much smaller thing than you've worked on in the

past, but you know about building things, you know about product

you've kind of seen how bigger companies work and scale.

We're about to go buy our first company. Do you want to help out? So I basically

said, yeah, sounds great. Came to the office, just like fell in love with the

team. The customers love the product.

The team's like super passionate about what we do. Everyone's super like

authentically interested in what we do.

That mix of like good product market fit.

Super passionate team.

Super strong culture.

Kind of sucked me in.

We set out, like, we were, like, talking through, like, what we wanted to do

when we grew up.

I said, we have to be made in America.

Forever.

Like, it's really easy to, like, start a company here and then get big enough

and then be like...

let's just move this product line to China.

That'll be fine.

And I was like, no. If we're going to do this, we're going to commit to doing it

right and be disciplined about it.

That means we have to make some hard trade -offs, but that's what we're going

do.

And everybody was like, yes, 100%. I was like, okay, easier than I expected.

We're like, well, what do we aspire to? There's a bunch of people who want

financial metrics out there, and that's the easy way to do it.

And we ended up settling on being the biggest, most badass brand that's made

America.

Period.

See you next time.

B -A -M -F stands for Badass Mother... Oh, sorry, I can't say that. Big

Manufacturing Facility.

You know, we're really, really proud about being made in America. That's been

sort of a core tenant of the brand since it started, and that's not something

we're ever going to get away from. We love the fact that, you know, we've got

products that are sold mostly to Americans for, you know, a vehicle that

lot to the American public.

And it really starts, actually, up in our north building of Defiance, Ohio,

which is our injection molding facility. We have three...

Very, very large high -end injection molding machines that we have there that

are making all of our drawer system parts.

Those get quality checked there and then brought down into the bottom part of

the south building, which is where all of our assembly and warehouse can go.

Molded parts come in, along with lots of other parts that we get from some of

our suppliers there. So metal brackets, the steel C -channels that help support

the frame, kits that we have that make sure we've got all the right fasters in

there so people can put their drawer systems together.

Then it gets brought into the line.

We start by cutting the deck panel, and so that's how we make sure we've got

that really clean fit against the bed rails of every drawer system. We have

computer software from the OEMs who tell us what the bed dimensions are, and we

make sure we've got a really clean fit.

Deck panels get cut. Those get put in the bottom of the box, put in the

divert the support feet, attach them to the seat channels, so that sort of forms

a subframe of the system that you have.

And then finally the accessories go in right at the tail end of the line in the

kit, and that's pretty much it. It's about two minutes or a little less start

finish. We can make over 350 drawer systems a day with that process.

So it gets boxed up there, fits on the shelves, and then it's ready to ship out

all across the country.

My name is Matthew DeRoges. I am a category manager at DECT, but I'm

brand new to DECT. I just came here because I love the product. It kind of

facilitates that outdoor lifestyle.

I'm a year -round angler and hunter, and I think it's just a great opportunity

to build something that I feel really passionately about in my day -to -day.

The back of this taco has a mid -sized legacy drawer system.

I use it to create really tangible space where I can still live above.

deck system during hunting season so I can store everything I need in the

drawers and just have that extra space above if I'm sleeping there or have

additional things I need to store. So I use it in tandem with some of our deco

boxes and just organize all my different kits.

It's a peace of mind thing for me, I guess.

Everything's stored away.

being in product i'm just naturally an ocd person so i like things stored and i

pay good money for my and i like it to be stored in a safe secure place i don't

think really nice stuff belongs in really cheap boxes um so you know kind

checks all the boxes for me

You kind of pinch yourself sometimes because I was telling my team the other

day, I'm like, you guys, this doesn't happen every day. This opportunity

come around very often.

And this is starting to matter.

It's starting to really be something.

And 10 years ago, I had this kind of idea of what this would be like. I had

idea. I'd never done anything like this, what it would turn into.

The best note I ever got about DECT was a guy, literally an oil field welder at

age 75 in Wyoming, and he was crying.

He calls me and says, thank you for making this product. I can work another

years. I mean, how good is that?

The guy's beat up. He can't crawl in and out of the truck. You can't get a 500

-pound welder from the cab side of the truck to the tailgate.

But he came with us.

Jake always had a belief in sort of the nobility of working with your hands. The

original idea for the drawer system, it was entirely focused on tradespeople.

And he thought that that's the use case that we're solving. People were working

out of their trucks every single day.

If we can make their life on the job site easier, if we can make it so that

get injured less often because they're not climbing in and out of their truck

beds so often, there's some nobility to that.

That's why we want to make products that are not just sort of cool and catch the

eye but are useful.

Something that was really important to me as a young mother with a young family

was that culture of like really prioritizing family and especially

we do, making sure that we can capitalize on getting our families

And not just, you know, working a 14 -hour day to work a 14 -hour day, but be

outside and enjoy this place that we live.

You ready to go fishing?

Come here.

Kind of part of the job, which is pretty fun. And just having that sort of

alignment is, I think, what keeps me really passionate about working at Duck.

I think people develop better connections and think more clearly if

healthy and clear -headed and kind of know the people behind, you know, who

they're working with, you know, the personalities, kind of where they're

from, what they're going through on a given day. And I think that allows them

be a lot more effective in their jobs, frankly. Like, we're all people, right?

We're all different. We're all having good days. We're all having bad days.

Sometimes a little fresh air and sunlight is good for the soul.

Today we have our annual deck pickleball open.

I'm going to slay out there today, so I have to dress the part.

Everybody else is waiting until they get to the court, but, you know, one of our

fun things that we do at deck, we put a theme to everything.

And, you know, if you can't slay well, you need to look the part.

The U .S. decked open one -handed world pickleball championship

every June.

We battle it out here at Cinta Court to decide who has the bragging rights of

being the best at the dumbest sport this country's ever known.

This is Ken from Barbie, the whole ensemble.

Maybe his shoes are a little off -brand, but otherwise, right, bringing it,

trying to get the 80s tennis vibe going.

But I think one thing we got right, right out of the gate, was really the

of the brand.

having fun, knowing that the world needs a laugh every now and then and not

taking ourselves too seriously.

Taking our work super seriously, but not ourselves.

This is decked at its finest.

It's a group that works really hard, but sometimes you've got to let off some

steam. There's a few things you can do to build team camaraderie.

You could go to bud school, do like the Navy SEALs do it, or you just come out

and bang a plastic ball around with a beer in your hand.

This is the way deck does it.

That feeling you have is when your product is making life easier for

Right, and the next best is watching people who are inside the company

and grow and become more successful.

I want people to be outside. I want them to be healthy and be quick on their

feet and in their mind. I think it's good for longevity for the brand and

great for the culture.

And so far it looks like it's working out pretty well.