Chad Paranto has overseen the Maui Gift & Craft Fair in Lahaina for seven years, turning it into a popular Sunday activity for visitors and locals alike.

Located at Lahaina Gateway shopping center, it was “the biggest craft fair on Maui,” Paranto said, with about 50 vendors. “It was like a mini-version of the Aloha (Stadium) Swap Meet, but without the miscellaneous junk items.”

Though the Lahaina Gateway center, located about a mile north of the main downtown area of Lahaina, survived the Aug. 8 fire, the site was hardly appropriate for a fair. So Paranto moved his vendors to Kihei, at the corner of Keonekai and South Kihei roads, where he had been running a smaller fair on Wednesdays.

“We started right away in Kihei, back up a week later, and just kept it going,” said Paranto, who also owns Maui Fine Art, a gallery in Kihei that sells glassware, landscape artwork and crafts made by local artists. “We were like the pulse, the heartbeat of Maui at that point, because we were trying to support the people that lost everything.”

Since then, however, his biggest worry has become whether there will be any customers. Shortly after the fire, politicians and celebrities warned against traveling to Maui, which undercut the island’s tourism-based economy. Maui businesses even had to ask airlines to remove “red flags” on Maui, suggesting the entire island was under a travel restriction, he said.

“That was only for West Maui,” he said. “The rest of Maui needs tourism more than ever.”

Business has been “really slow” so far at the relocated craft fair, he said, but visitors who do come get a warm welcome.

“When people come to my craft show, I ask them if they’re a visitor, and if they are, I first thank them for being brave,” he said.

Paranto was not in Lahaina the day of the fire, but his employees were preparing a craft fair at a resort in Kaanapali early that day. That plan was aborted after a wind gust caught a 30-pound brass sculpture that he uses as a centerpiece for his fairs. “That thing flew 30 feet that day,” said Paranto, who promptly told his workers to pack up and leave the area.

Paranto himself would soon be busy dealing with fire in Kihei, where he lives. It struck near a warehouse where he keeps business supplies, and he had to help his daughter evacuate. Other fires were reported in Wailuku and Upcountry Maui that day.

“The whole island was on fire,” he said. “I had no idea what happened in Lahaina. I knew there was a fire there, but I didn’t know the town was on fire.”

Paranto also has a shave ice shop in Kihei and is using five of its nine freezers to make free ice for anyone who needs it. He also has opened a GoFundMe campaign for nine vendors from Lahaina who lost their homes to the fire, raising about $11,000 so far.

One of those vendors, Lani Williams, who makes clutches and accessories, was one of the survivors who escaped the fire by scrambling into the water along Front Street. She remembers it being so hot that “a bird, midair, dropped dead in front of me.”

With the help of a young man, Williams and her mother, who needs a walker, climbed over the sea wall along Front Street and made the 8-foot drop down to the shore, huddling there for about 10 hours before rescuers arrived. It was a balancing act between waves and fire, she said, with the water surprisingly being a “blessing” at times.

“Every time the heat got unbearable, a wave would crash over us,” she said, “or when the smoke was too thick to breathe or see, the wave would clear the air so we could get a little bit of air.”

Williams’ apartment was destroyed in the fire, along with her sewing machine, supplies and a sizeable amount of inventory that was headed for the Made in Hawaii Festival on Oahu. She’s still mulling the impact of the fire.

“After you lose everything, it kind of just made me rethink everything about my life,” she said. “A lot of people have been so helpful, and (offered) so much aloha, and offered sewing machines, but I haven’t been able to (work). … I tried to sit down and sew, and I sat there for nearly two hours and couldn’t sew anything.”

Another vendor Paranto’s GoFundMe campaign is helping, tarot card reader Ashley Probst, lost her family home in the fire, where she was storing the tent and chairs she uses at craft fairs. Friends and families have offered her supplies, “but at the same time, the lack of vendors makes the craft fairs very slow,” she said.

The Lahaina fair “was definitely my best, most consistent show,” she said. “That was the one I was always most excited for.”

Probst started reading tarot cards about seven years ago, while studying in England. She offered readings online and got “really amazing feedback, and I thought, ‘Wow, I think I have something here. I should continue with this.’”

For more on Paranto’s GoFundMe campaign and the vendors he’s helping, visit 808ne.ws/mauicraftfair.