Holiday gift-shopping is often an exercise — hiking through parking lots, aisles and aisles of vendors at craft fairs and festivals, all the while trying to find that uniquely Hawaiian gift item.
COVID-19 has shut all those events this year, but you can let your fingers do the walking by going online. You can visit the individual websites of your favorite stores, but for a broader scope it’s better to go online to the virtual marketplaces that tout Hawaii-made products.
Tens of thousands of items are sold online through these websites, so here are some tips to help you get through it all:
1) Visit early and often. Shopping online is convenient, but it can be exhausting, simply because of the pure volume of items on sale. Your mouse finger will get a workout clicking through the pages and pages of products, so give it a break once in a while.
2) Create a separate text file and cut-and-paste items for things that you’re interested in, including price, manufacturer and the website you found them on. Many websites have a place for “products you recently looked at,” but it will fill up fast and items will drop off. In addition, some items appear in more than one market, with slight variation in price, and you’ll want to keep track.
3) Every product made in Hawaii has a story, and virtual markets encourage manufacturers to tell it, providing links to their websites or their bios and backstories. It’s easy to get absorbed in the story — nothing wrong with that — but you’ve also spent a few precious minutes reading it, and those minutes begin to add up.
4) Check shipping arrangements. Some websites offer free shipping, others offer free shipping on orders exceeding a certain amount.
Here are a few websites selling Hawaii-made products:
Made in Hawaii Festival
madeinhawaiifestival.com
The pandemic led to the cancellation of the in-person festival, typically held in August at the Blaisdell Center, so executive director Amy Hammond took it online. “The vendors are grateful to have a place to sell their goods,” she said. “I think they’re very enthusiastically looking forward to the holiday season and hoping that people will also ramp up their purchasing.”
The website has kept most of the vendors who had been participating in the in-person event, and has added about a dozen newcomers as well, for a total about 300 vendors, Hammond said.
Orders came in nationwide during the site’s debut in August, with most vendors hitting their target sales, she said.
Food items have proved to sell particularly well on madehawaiifestival.com, a boon to Branen Yamamoto of Huff ‘n Puff Macadamia Nut Delights. He would normally be hawking his puffed rice-macadamia nut confections at craft fairs this time of year, but he has made significant sales through the website.
“I was expecting I was going to take a yearlong break. I was really sad,” he said. “But once (the website) launched, it was just orders after orders. It really gave me hope again.”
What’s really surprised him this year is that people are buying his products without tasting any of them. “Normally we give out so many samples at the fairs. I pride myself at the amount of samples we give out,” he said. “But the amount of people who ordered (online) from that fair, it really turned things around for me. … It changed my whole year.”
House of Mana Up
houseofmanaup.com
This business accelerator program helps local entrepreneurs face the challenges of growth, helping them scale up to become nationwide and even worldwide entities. “Those challenges could be anywhere from manufacturing, branding, narrative, legal, packaging, finances, all of those things that can be a problem for local companies,” said Meli James, co-founder of the program.
So far Mana Up has worked with 51 local companies, and its goal is to develop 100 companies with $10 million each in annual revenue, James said. “What would another $1 billion look like for the state of Hawaii?” she asked. “And it’s really about jobs and opportunities here on the islands.”
Many of the companies Mana Up has worked with sell seemingly commonplace items, yet with that uniquely Hawaiian touch. Kapa Nui Nails is a Hawaii island-based company that manufactures nail polish. Its product is water-based and nontoxic, which means no more headache-inducing odors. “Over a billion bottles of nail polish are sold annually,” said Kapa Nui co-founder Terry Lam, “It is the No. 1 selling beauty product in the world.”
Kapa Nui has benefited from the pandemic, which led to the closure of nail salons and made women aware of toxicity in cosmetics. “Women that are looking for cleaner products are finding us. Where Mana Up is helping is getting our name out there in a much bigger market than we could afford, being such a small business,” Lam said, adding that with Mana Up’s help, she hopes to break into the Japanese market soon.
Pop-Up Makeke
popupmakeke.com
A direct response to the pandemic, this website launched after the Merrie Monarch Festival was canceled and vendors realized such events would be gone for some time. It ran for a few weeks, and has been brought back for the holidays by the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement, which manages the site.
Pop-Up Makeke is a combination local Amazon.com/QVC, with both a website and TV show promoting goods from more than 400 vendors. The site features excellent navigation tools, like madeinhawaiifestival.com. Put your mouse over a broad category like Hawaiiana & Native Arts, and a pop-up menu appears breaking things down further into lauhala hats, lauhala bags, featherwork, kapa and other categories. This can really help save time.
Jessica Ke‘ala Kim of Limahana Art & Apparel sells her block-printed apparel and notecards on Pop-Up Makeke. She likes that it has free shipping, courtesy of the site’s sponsors, and lets vendors keep all profits. (There is a small fee for handling.) “It’s a total win situation for vendors,” she said.
Kim was one of Pop-Up Makeke’s top sellers for October. And for good reason: her affordably priced shawls, blouses, dresses and notecards are simple and elegant, yet the artistry that goes into them is readily apparent. “I like to tell people about the process. It’s not a silk-screen or sent away to be printed,” she said. “It’s all me, hand-printing it, one at a time.”
Hawaii Made
hawaiimade.com
Shannon Cuadro, a Maui-based artist who works at the Maui Arts & Cultural Center, launched this beautiful site after friends encouraged her to sell her handpainted cards. Its product line reflects her personal tastes and interests, focusing on home and bath products, specialty food items, accessories and art, all produced in small quantities by local artisans. Of particular note on her site are a number of Pegge Hopper prints, a somewhat unusual item to feature on a site not linked to a gallery.
“I read that art is really hard to sell online, because it’s such an emotional purchase,” Cuadro said. “But Pegge Hopper is so iconic. … Her work, with the block color and block art, is pretty easy to understand.”
Hopper’s works are among her most popular items. “I grew up with Pegge Hopper on most people’s walls,” she said. “It’s kind of a call home” — a comment that could describe everything Cuadro sells.
Hawaiian Farmers Market
hawaiianfarmersmarket.com
Owner Loren Shoop has sold macadamia nut products, jams and jellies, and currently breadfruit chips, through his company Ulu Mana. This work has put him in touch with other Hawaii food producers who create value-added products like macadamia nuts, coffees and teas, cookies, chips and seasonings. He created his website about five years ago and revamped it when the pandemic hit.
In addition to selling products individually, Shoop will put together gift packs of his items for you. He knows each one of his 25 vendors and their products personally, so he knows what goes together. For some vendors, he provides the sole online presence for their products, such as Kihene Tea from Hawaii island and Keith’s Cookies.
“It makes me happy to be able to move really small, local products,” said Shoop, who offers free shipping on local sales over $59 and on mainland sales over $99. (He is also offering a 10% discount on the first order to Star-Advertiser readers who use the code Star2020.)
