The thesis is older than the clothes. Before there was a shirt with our name on it, there was a canvasback designed to look the way the Dudley brothers carved them on Knotts Island, on Currituck Sound, around 1892. Above the waterline, it is 1923. Below, it is 2023. The apparel grew up around that idea — it did not invent it.

Brad Sanders did not grow up in North Carolina. The Marine Corps brought him here, and he stayed. He is not a carver, and he has never claimed to be. The carver is Keith Hendrickson — a working bench artisan and a Best of Show winner at the Ward Museum of Wildfowl Art's Chesapeake Challenge.

Brad started with molded foam decoys in 2015 because he wanted something that looked the way the old birds looked. In October 2016 he found Keith. The first wood originals came off Keith's bench, and the Heritage Series was designed from those carved masters. Dixie Decoys, LLC was formed in March 2017 in New Bern. Decoy production began that July. Apparel followed the same year, as a small extension of the same idea.

For eight years the company carried both. The apparel grew. The decoys stayed on the bench. On October 1, 2025, the consumer-facing name caught up to where the work had gone: DECOY Apparel Co. Dixie Decoys, LLC is still the legal entity. The decoys are still made. The address has not moved.

The canvasback on the mark is descended from a real pair of birds. Lee and Lem Dudley were twin brothers who carved working decoys at their shop on Knotts Island, on Currituck Sound at the North Carolina–Virginia line, beginning around 1892. The Shelburne Museum in Vermont holds a Dudley ruddy duck that a 1981 symposium of decoy scholars voted the greatest duck decoy ever made. The birds had no eyes, no ornament, no extravagance. They were big, and they showed up in the water.

The Heritage Series is designed from Keith Hendrickson's carved originals, produced from his masters, and hand-finished in New Bern. Those three verbs are the shorthand that holds. We do not say DECOY carves anything. The carving belongs to Keith and to the lineage that runs back through Currituck Sound. The lineage points at the birds; the brand points at the lineage.

DECOY is for the canvas-and-leather sportsman who keeps a hand-carved decoy spread or wants to, who oils a grandfather's gun, who reads Ruark and Buckingham on the porch in winter, and who believes the sporting tradition is worth tending. He is the steward, not the consumer. The clothes work for the field and the field-adjacent life — the Thursday office, the Saturday marsh, the Sunday club. The good old days are now.