Makers Call Company has no doubt taken off. We recently released an article from an interview we had with Colton Thompson of Makers Call Company. This time, we had the pleasure of talking to the other half of the operation- Travis Ward. The Tennessee native has had a passion for chasing ducks all his life. Ward gave us some insight as to how he got started in the call-making business, how his love for duck calls started, and his goals and plans for the future of Makers, all the while keeping his priorities centered around family, church, and calling.
Ward grew up in Huntingdon, Tennessee, left for three years to pursue a college degree, then made his way back home, and says he doesn’t have any plans on leaving. It’s where he, his wife, and two kids call home. Travis grew up hunting with his dad and says he was fortunate enough to have some really good places to hunt in west Tennesee. He also notes that he grew up in the same town as world champion caller Mike McLemore, someone who he looked up to and helped get him into the world of duck calling and call-collecting. “My dad and I started to get into call collecting together. We’d go to the Reelfoot Waterfowl Festival together, and I’d get to meet a bunch of the old school call makers, and talking to them really got me interested in the whole thing,” says Travis. In 2007 Ward started to get involved in making his own calls. Leaning on some help from McLemore and a few other call makers. “I’d take a call to Mike and let him blow it, and he’d say ‘well you need to work on this part of the sound’ and I’d always ask, ‘well how do I do that?’ and he’d say, ‘I don’t know, go figure it out.’ But that helped me get better as a call maker, and as a call blower, because I learned how to use a call, and how to get the sounds I was wanting, and I learned how to critique the call to get the sound it needed to perform better” says Ward.
After taking a new job, and starting a family, Ward decided to put making duck calls on the back burner for a bit. However, after a trip to the NWTF call-making competition to help as a judge, he says that each time he picked up a call to blow, he kept thinking to himself, “I could make a call that sounds this good.”. So Travis decided it was time to get back to the lathe and see if he could make a run at the call-making competition the following year. “It was mainly just a challenge for me to see if I could actually do what I said I could do,” he continues on, “I really started to focus on building calls that sounded good, and trying to build in the sounds that I was looking for”. Ward entered three calls into the next competition. However, because he had never placed first in the category, he was entered into the “amateur” category. One of his calls received him the award of “2019 Grand National Callmaker of the Year”, another received the Chairman’s Award for “favorite hunting entry”, while the third call took home a third-place medal. Needless to say, Travis accomplished his goal. But winning these types of awards wasn’t anything new for him. In 2011 Ward was the Youth National Amateur Callmaker at the NWTF Call Making Contest. Even from an early age Travis had an ear for what looked and sounded good, and he had an obvious talent for taking that sound from his ears to the lathe, to the call.
After Ward’s time away from building his own custom calls, he learned that the market for custom-built, small shop calls had started to explode. So back into the shop he went. One thing Ward is big on is the sound of the call. “I love the decorative calls, I think they’re beautiful and require a lot of skill to build, but my main thing is the sound. I don’t really see the point in building a call, if you can’t hunt with it,” Ward says. “I’d rather build a call that sounds good, with a regular oil finish, that someone can beat up and use, than a call that’s gonna sit on somebody’s shelf”.
Leading up to this point, Travis came into contact with another custom call maker, Colton Thompson (who you can read about here), which would lead to the creation of Makers Call Company. Ward says, “I and he both had similar styles of calling and we both liked the same sounds in our calls, so we decided to team up together and share the load as far as all the time and money that goes into making and building calls. Then we could just mesh our styles together and see what we could come up with”. The first call that they produced was called the “Origin”, which was based on one of Travis’ tone boards, but a lot of time was spent making some tweaks to get the shape and sound they wanted and to finally release the call. In November of last year, the call hit the market and became a fan favorite by everyone who had gotten their hands on one. After that, Colton had spent some time working on a cutdown call that they released called the “Makers Cut”. “Right now we’re extremely proud of what we’ve got. It’s been a lot of fun so far. It’s a lot of time, and it’s been a lot of money invested, but it’s fun”.
When asked about the hardest part of learning how to build calls, Travis says that he’s not the type of guy who’s prone to asking people how they did something that he thought was cool. He’s more of the guy who’s going to go try to figure it out on his own. “For me, it was a lot of trial and error in developing what I wanted. Trying to get it right from ear to sound, and get the right feel and shape of the call, it’s changed a lot over the last few years,” Travis says. He goes on to say that there’s been a lot of “reverse engineering”, starting out with a call in his hand, and a particular sound in his head, and trying to figure out how to make that call produce the sound he wants. “There’s been a lot of wasted material, and a lot of hours in the shop, just trying stuff out. I’ll go out there in my free time just thinking ‘well what if I try this?’ just for it to not work at all. Then it’s right back to the drawing board”.
Ward says that calling ducks has been something that he’s always enjoyed. “When I go hunting, I don’t go to shoot ducks, I go to call at ducks,” he says. He mentions that he’s always been a pretty good caller, which would only make sense, coming from a background of making calls at a young age, having a father that was a call collector, and a mentor that was a world champion. Ward says it wouldn’t bother him a bit if he went hunting every day and didn’t carry a gun, all he had to do was call the birds and let his buddies shoot. “If I can’t carry my calls somewhere when I hunt, I’m probably just not going to go,” says Travis. Ward says that he’s a pretty aggressive caller. “I like a louder call because my theory has always been ‘you can get quiet on a loud call, but you can’t get loud on a quiet call’”. He says that’s what he was after when designing the Origin call, and he believes he got it. “It might be too much for some people, and that’s ok if that’s not what they want, but it’s exactly what I want”.
When it comes to the custom call side of things, Ward says that he never really had a “custom call business”, he more just made custom calls here and there to pay for tools and toys. The one thing he learned is he would get burnt out from the monotony of building one call after another after another. What he really found himself enjoying, and why he enjoys his part in Makers so much, is the problem solving and the development of new things. “In my mind, once I get something down-pat, I don’t want to keep doing it over and over, I want to move on to something else,” he notes. Ward says that now, most of his time spent in the shop is trying to come up with something new, instead of just building the same call over and over again. Which is a breath of fresh air from the custom call making he used to do. It also explains the reason for the new calls that Makers has in store for the coming year. Ward says that he has plans for a new J-frame call. The plans are in his head, he just needs to get it onto paper and into the material.
One element to being a carmaker, and call seller that’s important to Travis, is being able to talk to the people that are buying his calls. That’s why his number is on the website. He says that if he wants to buy a call, or get help with a call, he doesn’t want to talk to a website, or talk to someone in customer service, he wants to talk to someone who can really help him. That leads to the way he and Colton plan to run their company. If you want to call Travis and get his input on what call to buy, or which call would fit your calling style, you can call him up and ask. It’s a personal, one on one setting where he can help you find exactly what you’re looking for, and he believes that’s what makes the good call companies last longer than the rest. Ward goes on to say, “My phone may ring with a number I don’t know, and I know it’s someone wanting to buy a call, and I may have a million other things going on, but I’m going to pick up the phone and help them out”. Travis says that it means a lot to the customer when they can get a hold of you, or at least know that if you leave them a message, you’ll get back to them. Ward goes on to talk about the style of the shop they want to run by saying, “Colton and I don’t want to be famous, but we don’t want people to know about Makers without knowing who we are. And I mean by that, is if someone buys a call from us, we want to make sure that they have every chance in the world to get help from either me or Colton, and know that we’re here in case they need anything. We just want people to know who they’re dealing with, and help people out”.
One thing Travis runs into when making calls is the fact that he has to remember that your average duck hunter doesn’t spend 350 days a year blowing a duck call. Just because he can fit his style into almost any call, doesn’t mean that everyone else can, so he tries to keep that in mind as much as he can when designing his calls and designing his tone boards. Making sure they have enough “margin for error”, that they’re still easy for the casual duck caller to operate. “I try to make sure I work a large margin of error into my calls. I’m not saying you can’t hit a bad note, but it’s a lot easier to hit a good note, even if you messed up a little bit”. Something that appeals to probably most duck hunters out there looking for a call that is easy to operate, and doesn’t require a ridiculous amount of finesse to operate just so you can call ducks in. Ward continues on, “There are sweet spots in every call, and we try to extend those in each call we make. If you want to push a call to hit a certain note, you can do that, and if you want to push it even harder, you can still hit that note”. Travis says it was hard to stop adapting to a call, and blowing it like your average Joe would, but doing so allowed him to figure out how to make it a more user-friendly call, that can also reach the realms of high-end main-street routines.
As was stated above, in November of last year, Travis got his hands on the first run on Origin calls. He decided to give a few out to some friends that he knew were good on calls, but even better hunters. The feedback he got was nothing but raving reviews of the calls, talking about how great the call is, how easy it is to operate, and how good the call sounds. “I love hearing stuff like that because it just validates what we’re doing,” Travis says. From there, the Origin hit the market, followed by the Makers Cut, and it’s been go-time ever since. With hunters and guides all over the country getting their hands on them, the general consensus is no doubt that Travis has helped create a new powerhouse in the call-making industry, with no intent to go anywhere.
The future plans for Makers are to keep developing new calls that help hunters kill ducks, and be a call company that 20 years from now, people talk similarly about the shops today like RNT, Echo, Hobo, and so on. Travis says that he wants to be a call company that lasts for generations and that fathers can tell their sons about the time they met him and Colton and got their call from the Makers shop. With the direction they’re headed, that seems like it won’t be far off.
