They say necessity is the mother of invention, but in Todd Ezzi’s case, the mother of invention was the size and weight of a dog stand that made getting into and out of flooded timber on duck hunts difficult.
“In 2019, I had just gotten a new dog, and we were in the middle of Government Cypress, which is in Bayou Meto,” said Ezzi, a physical science and religion teacher and head basketball coach at Catholic High School in Little Rock. “It’s a walk-in area, and I was probably a mile back from where I wanted to get. I was carrying a traditional tree stand that a lot of companies have sold for years, and it was big and bulky.
“I’m sitting there hunting and thinking and came up with the idea that there’s got to be a better way to do this. So, I went home, got in my shop, and started cutting metal and welding and came up with my first prototype.”
The homemade dog stand would go through several refinements, but everyone who saw the prototype knew Ezzi was on to something. The finished product is a steel and mesh platform that connects in seconds to tree trunks from 4 inches to almost 10 feet in circumference. The product features a working load limit of 120 pounds, yet weighs less than 8 pounds. It is the flagship product for Ezzi’s company, Rixey Outdoors.
“We launched our website in the summer of 2020, and we went to the first Ducks Unlimited Expo in Dallas, the DUX Expo. It was a really big show,” said Ezzi, a 1998 CHS graduate. “We didn’t sell a lot of products there, but everybody who saw it loved it. We knew it was going to be a big hit in other markets.”
While the Lone Star State may not have had much use for the invention, every hunter who needed to keep their canine out of freezing water in between quarry retrievals was soon beating a path to Ezzi’s door.
“We get a lot of orders from South Carolina, Georgia, all the way up to some in the Midwest,” Ezzi said.
The product, which has received one patent and has one pending, has received interest from several retailers, but Ezzi is marketing directly to consumers to keep the price down. He’s also made it a priority to have it made entirely in Arkansas, which he has achieved. All of which is icing on the cake of a dream he’s long held to launch a product in the sport he loves.
“Becoming invested in the outdoor industry is always something I was interested in,” he said. “I grew up as a kid always kind of dreaming about having my own hunting TV show or being able to hunt or fish for a living. This has given me an opportunity to be able to get out and meet people in the industry and get the experience, partially as a career.”
