After some 60 years making thousands of lei for her Chinatown shop, Cindy Lau has never tired of stringing flowers into a garland, and still pauses to marvel at their beauty.

At 87, the attractively dressed lady is happy to take on 10-hour shifts at Cindy’s Lei & Flower Shoppe on Maunakea Street every day with a handful of family members and staff. “I love the work; it’s fun with all the flowers, all my good customers,” she said, regarding the regulars as old friends.

The shop began as Fook Shing Lau’s barbershop many years before Cindy immigrated from the Guangdong Province of China in 1951 to marry one of the owner’s sons. Cindy’s mother-in-law started selling corsages and lei as a side business, eventually replacing the haircuts by the late ’50s, and Cindy inherited the family business in 1961.

Within a three-block radius about 10 tiny lei shops are crowded into the historic downtown market district, but Cindy’s Lei has survived the competition in Chinatown and even from chain stores like Longs Drugs and Costco.

Cindy’s is the go-to spot for residents and corporations, particularly when they need something special, says Cindy Lau’s daughter Karen Lee, store manager. It’s easy to miss under a faded red awning that marks the narrow entryway, but “business is incessant,” with a FedEx delivery truck stopping daily to transport orders all over the world. A dozen first place awards for best lei stand in the state, including the last four years, hang at the entrance.

Her mother is one of the few original lei shop owners still active — “This is her paradise, her lifeblood,” Lee said.

“Mom has a real deep love for the lei, she still appreciates the intricacy of the craft, and the colors.” Nouveau designs in lei-making excite her, Lee said. Most of all, “she gets the aloha. When you get a lei, it reminds you, you are in Hawaii. … When you get a lei, somebody thought of you! It’s sweet and kind.”

Lee jokes that if her mother wasn’t so pretty and easy for customers to like, Cindy’s Lei would have not survived the competition. She often teased her late father Raymond for choosing Cindy for her good looks when he went to China to find a bride. Her mother, who arrived as Sun Choy Chan, was soon nicknamed “Cindy” and learned English while helping at the family store.

It was Cindy’s mother-in-law, Kam Yee Lee Lau, who had the savvy to start selling corsages out of the barbershop to sailors, who bought them to give to girls at the nearby dance halls. When her in-law suffered a stroke, Cindy nursed her for four years until she died in 1959, and was later entrusted with ownership of the shop.

Cindy had little experience in running a business, but she loved working with flowers and had the courage to take on the shop, a major undertaking for an uneducated farm girl who grew up around rice fields. Lee is proud that her mother evolved into a business proprietor with exceptional drive, who sent four of her five children to college.

On the other hand, Lee and her four brothers were “trapped as children” into working at the shop, and sometimes had to miss school to help fill big orders. She tried escaping to Maui for 10 years, where she sold real estate for a while, but without fail, every year she flew home to help her mom during the frenzied graduation season of May and June.

In 1983, Lee came back for good, and later expanded the business with brothers Raymond and Ronnie Lau (the latter died last year). By then lei had gained enormous popularity as a way to celebrate any transition, any big or little occasion, including in the business arena. They gradually expanded the shop, now four times the size of the original, and widened their customer base via the internet. The labor-­intensive pikake, ginger, tuberose and orchid lei are the top sellers, requiring 12 staffers during high season (April to June).

The shop’s fourth generation includes Lee’s two sons and other relatives, including cousin Alex Lau, 17, who has been doing odd jobs since grade school. While hanging out there every afternoon, Alex’s first chores were sweeping out the back, and, “Oh my, God, peeling ginger for four hours!” Most of the kids got stuck with the dreaded task that entailed peeling the outer petals off bunches of ginger flowers, and fluffing out the inner petals to make a lush-looking lei, he said.

Alex has acquired a valuable work ethic, particularly from “Popo,” his grandmother. “She never gives up. She’s 87 and still going strong. I totally respect that. She made it a lot easier for us because of all the hard work she did.” Cindy also praised Alex, the youngest of her nine grandsons: “He help me the most, he do anything for me!”

Lee said her eldest son, Nicholas Lee, 29, would be the one to take over the shop when she retires, but they’re both discouraged by the exhausting and never-ending work. Nicholas Lee also worries that he doesn’t have his mother’s knack for predicting how much of the perishable product will be needed every season — “we can’t freeze flowers,” Karen Lee added.

Moreover, she is bothered by the lack of organization and leadership within the lei industry. Demand is huge, but “it’s getting harder for us to fulfill our product, our inventory.”

Lei sellers face obstacles such as the dwindling number of ornamental farms, rising labor costs, and the vulnerability of blossoms to pests and the weather. “That’s why there’s no sugar cane, no pineapple. I worry that the flower lei is going to take that path or that Thailand is going to monopolize the industry,” she said.

All that’s needed to make a lei by hand is a needle and string. “There’s no way we can automate this,” Lee said. “In a way, it’s the misery of it all and it’s the beauty of it all, right?”

At least she knows her customers appreciate handcrafted items.

“I think that’s what sustains me, the appreciation,” she said. The shop receives countless thank-you notes for lei that will be forever associated with special memories of a daughter’s graduation, a milestone birthday or even the last scent surrounding a relative’s deathbed. “I feel fortunate people allowed us to be part of their lei tradition.”