About Bushface Ducks

From that garage workbench, Bushface Ducks has grown into a global operation. We now employ more than 6,000 people across 38 countries, with export and goodwill partnerships that extend into diplomatic and government channels worldwide.

Our global headquarters on Vashon Island, Washington houses our design, manufacturing oversight, and executive teams, and stands as a symbol of how far a single rubber duck can travel. Every duck we ship still traces back to that first one on the workbench.

A Strange Kind of Neighbor

We are, by any honest accounting, a large multinational corporation that has built a several-hundred-thousand-square-foot, duck-shaped office campus on an island best known, until fairly recently, for its ferry terminal, its lavender farms, and a strong collective preference that nothing much change. We are aware of how this looks. We are aware, specifically, that Bushface Ducks now employs more people than live on Vashon Island itself, a fact that has been the subject of at least two tense town hall meetings, one strongly worded editorial in the island's community newsletter, and, as of last spring, a mural.

What has, somewhat improbably, kept the peace is mushrooms.

In the run-up to construction, facing genuine and well-organized local resistance over wetland impact and ferry congestion, the company entered into an arrangement with a group of local growers and mycologists that nobody on either side fully expected to still be running a decade later. In exchange for build approvals, Bushface Ducks agreed to divert filtered greywater and nutrient runoff from the headquarters' rooftop gardens directly into what has become the Vashon Island Experimental Mycology Cooperative, a sprawling, faintly glowing complex of grow tunnels tucked into the trees behind the east parking structure that the company now funds to the tune of just over two million dollars a year.

The Cooperative is, we're told by people who understand this far better than our marketing department does, doing genuinely serious research, and also, separately, growing a startling number of mushrooms shaped vaguely like ducks, an inevitability nobody planned for and everybody now leans into. A bioluminescent oyster mushroom variety cultivated on-site, unofficially nicknamed the Quackerel by the growers who first noticed it, is served in the company cafeteria exactly one week a year and is, according to the two members of our executive team willing to go on record about it, "genuinely excellent, weirdly so."

Every September the island hosts the Spore & Quack Festival, a joint production between the company and roughly a dozen community organizations, involving a farmers market, a guided foraging walk, a notably competitive rubber duck race in the ferry dock lagoon, and, somehow, a battle of the bands. Attendance regularly outnumbers the island's year-round population. Company logos are, per a standing agreement with the county and a fairly firm request from the community council, kept to a minimum, visible mainly on the recycling bins.

None of this makes us not a large corporation sitting on top of a small island's economy, and we don't pretend otherwise internally. But somewhere between the mushrooms, the festival, and a genuinely oversized annual donation to the volunteer fire department, something like acceptance took hold, the specific, slightly bemused kind of acceptance you'd expect a small island community to extend to a rubber duck company that grows glowing fungus in its basement. We'll take it.