Simply Organized to open new store in Kahala Mall

Simply Organized LLC, which opened its first store in Kapolei in 2008, will expand to Kahala Mall next year.

"We love that (Kahala) location," said Carol Ai May, vice president of Simply Organized LLC and vice president of City Mill Co.

The new Simply Organized will move into the 8,300-square-foot space occupied by Champs Sports, which will move elsewhere in the mall.

The new store will carry more than 3,000 products for organizing the home and office. As does the Kapolei store, the Kahala location will stage free, monthly "how-to" workshops on organizing the home or office and on making best use of closet space.

The Kapolei store, at the Crossroads at Kapolei, measures 12,000 square feet and employs 15 people.

May and her brother Steven, president of Simply Organized and City Mill, dreamed up the retail concept after seeing the proliferation of self-storage warehouses across Hawaii and elsewhere.

The Kahala store will be joining a long-established retail center, and despite its smaller size, May plans to hire 20 people because of the center’s higher foot traffic and the area’s larger population base. Hiring will begin next year, a few months before the store’s opening in the summer or fall.

The flagship store in Kapolei has seen a "fair amount of East Honolulu people" who, when the Kahala store opens, won’t have to drive nearly as far for organizational items. They also will be able to go to Macy’s, Cinnamon Girl and Aveda without having to get back into the car.

"There’s nothing like it in the area," May said. "I think it will be a good complement to the mall."

Simply Organized generally is a female-targeted store, but "when men come into it, they love it. … They find all these things that they can use, too."

May spoke of a dentist who, on his 50th birthday, came to Simply Organized in Kapolei. He bought baskets to create a uniform look for the file storage in his office, she said.

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On the Net:

» www.simplyorganized.net

JAVA JUMPIN’

Honolulu is the 11th-most caffeinated city in the U.S., according to a CNBC slide show posted online. The slide show is to promote CNBC’s new show "The Coffee Addiction."

The No. 1 caffeinated city is Seattle-Tacoma with 1,640 coffee shops as of July 31, as counted by the NPD Group Inc., a New York-based market research company.

Honolulu is represented in the slide show with a shot of the Honolulu Coffee Co. shop at the Moana Surfrider hotel in Waikiki, picturing, along with two female employees, Pete Licata. He is the Honolulu Coffee Co. director of quality control but also is the current U.S. Barista Champion of the Specialty Coffee Association of America.

CNBC contacted Ed Schultz, Honolulu Coffee Co. president, for a picture, which was arranged by Honolulu publicist Donna Jung.

CNBC had "a huge deadline" and wanted a shot that was "quintessentially Hawaiian," Jung said.

While not in a grass shack, and while servers aren’t wearing raffia hula skirts and coconut bras while dispensing each cuppa joe, the Waikiki store in the Moana "is pretty Hawaiian," Jung said. "It’s a historic building, the windows are open, letting in a wonderful breeze, and it has beautiful Hawaiian woods," she said.

The one-hour documentary will debut at 3 p.m. Thursday on CNBC (Oceanic 39 or digital 116) and will immediately be replayed.

The news release announcing the documentary makes no mention of Hawaii being the only coffee-growing state in the U.S., nor of Hawaii at all, really, so Schultz, with Jung’s help, is hoping to persuade the cable channel to come to Hawaii to further explore the topic.

So how much coffee do we consume? The slide show says the United States is 12th in the world for coffee consumption at an average of 106 ounces, or three kilograms of coffee per person per year. The world leader, it says, is Norway, at 10.7 kilograms, or nearly three gallons annually per person.

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Reach Erika Engle at erika@staradvertiser.com.