Hailing from a family with a retail history in the islands dating to the early 1900s, Rodney “Sparky” Doo confesses he was something of a late bloomer.

As a teen, he said, “I was just a beach bum.”

So after attending the University of Hawaii at Manoa for two years without direction, his father, James Doo, sent him off to study at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology to train him in the ways of the family business. And it worked.

“I went and I loved it,” said Doo, whose grandfather opened Yat Loy &Co., a clothing and dry goods store, on King Street in 1904. James Doo started the Hauoli Sales Co., which launched in Gem department stores before establishing his own free-standing stores in Pearl City and Kaneohe.

“I wanted to stay another year to study sales promotion and fashion photography, but my father needed me back home,” said Sparky, 67. “In 1969 he had just opened Hauoli stores and needed help.”

Haouli started as a traditional retailer of that era, offering button-down styles more in tune with the mainland than Hawaii.

Heeding the words of one of his New York instructors, Doo had learned to watch people as a key to success. He said he had been told, “I don’t care if you learned everything you know from a book. When you go out, just be aware of what people are wearing. They are the teachers of fashion. They will put together things you would never believe.”

Taking that advice to heart, Doo saw that surf shops and logo T-shirts were taking over the landscape, and to compete, he felt the need to launch his own surf brand. Doo’s instinct proved correct when Locals Only proved to be a hit at trade shows.

Although Locals Only was carried by Haouli stores, Doo decided he had to leave the family business in order to grow his business, and established Wings Sportswear in 1981.

Today Wings Sportswear is the parent company of Pineapple Juice and Palaka Hawaii, lines designed and sewn in Hawaii which share some of the history of local fashion.

Pineapple Juice specializes in vintage reproductions of Hawaiian shirts from Hawaii’s golden years of fashion, the 1930s to ’50s. The line was inspired by his own love of vintage shirts that he noticed sell for hundreds if not thousands of dollars — out of reach for most people.

Embracing the idea of the history of clothing in Hawaii, Palaka Hawaii ensembles are stitched from the woven checked fabric associated with the islands’ plantation heritage. The blue-and-white plaid, woven-cotton fabric now associated with Hawaii came from Germany in the 1800s. The heavy fabric was used to make long-sleeved shirts that shielded sugar and pineapple plantation workers from the elements.

Costco was one of the first champions of his palaka shirts, and on the sales floor, he said older customers are always quick point to his shirts and say, “Arakawa’s,” the name of the Waipahu plantation store that began serving plantation workers in 1909. In its heyday, when there was little retail to be found in Honolulu, people around the island shopped at Arakawa’s before it closed in 1995.

There was no such spark of recognition among the younger generation, but Doo said that is changing as schools pick up on the idea of wearing palaka shirts in their class colors. So what started out as shirts in classic indigo evolved to embrace a rainbow of colors, from green to pink and bright orange.

The Sept. 11, 2001, tragedy took a toll on retail businesses, and that’s when Doo started developing brand concepts and licensing them to companies with deeper pockets, capable of producing and marketing the lines. These include Liquid Aloha, Blue Paradise and his grandfather’s label, Hawaiian Moon, and the licensees tend to be from Japan.

“Japanese love Hawaii, they love history and they just know what to do with it,” Doo said. “At one point I wanted to branch out, so I went to show in Paris, hoping to get the European market. But I got more Japanese.”