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Accidental
The new Maui T-Shirt Factory started as a result of David Akiona missing a movie, Sanae Kamiya watching a TV commercial and Robert Shimizu following a tip. The rest is history and a new brand of aloha. Joseph W. Bean In a recent editorial, Maui Weekly publisher Joseph Sugarman said we all have two stories. One tells how we "ended up on Maui," and the other says "what we do for a living" here. For two of the three partners in Aloha T-shirt Co., story number one is short and sweet. Robert Shimizu was born here, raised in Kahului; and David Akiona was born here too, raised in Makawao with summers in Lahaina. They're still here because they love Maui and appreciate their good fortune. Partner number three, Sanae Kamiya, better known to South Maui as Sunny K, took the long way around from his birthplace in Japan to New York City to Maui. The story is too long to tell here, but you should buy him a beer one day and have him tell you about his life as a firefighter in Japan. That was disrupted when he saw the movie Backdraft "about ten times," and began to dream of being one of New York's heroic firefighters. That didn't work out. Instead, because of a citizenship issue, he had to settle for being an EMT, search and rescue worker. Then, sipping on a beer in a bar near the firehouse, he saw a TV commercial for Hawaii and realized, "I'm in the wrong place. I should be there." Days later, he was on Maui, and more long and funny stories started happening around him. All along, he had been an entrepreneur too, doing one sort of business or another wherever he was. Sunny discovered "people weren't setting that many fires on Maui in 1995." He wasn't needed by the fire department. So the entrepreneurial side game came to the fore, and led to the famously unique Sunny K shop in the Kukui Mall, Kihei. Along the way, Sunny had been a motorcycle
racer too. Although they didn't know each other at the time, David Akiona
was doing the same thing. Robert Shimizu was building and racing cars.
So, they all had motorsports in common. But, perhaps surprisingly, they
didn't meet at the raceway.
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Akiona
missed the start of a movie in the Kukui Mall, so he wandered into the
Sunny K shop. He was impressed with what he saw, but says "the T-shirts
needed help." Since he was doing design work and consulting, a lot of it
about T-shirts, he offered to do some work for Sunny. Meantime, Shimizu
had being doing a line of T-shirts for the motorsports market, but needed
help boosting his designs and especially their execution up to the level
he imagined was possible. He was referred to Akiona by a mutual client-friend.
What both Sunny and Robert needed was better design work and more precision
in the T-shirt printing. David is a very skilled artist, but he found that
the exacting standards he had for the shirt printing could just not be
achieved on Maui.
You put two local boys with a shared dream into a what-to-do situation with a globe-hopping Japanese entrepreneur who could also benefit if they found their solution, and you've got a recipe for innovation, creativity and success. In this case, it's recipe for a T-shirt-printing factory that "brings the mainland to Maui" in terms of modern equipment and narrow tolerances-not to mention exceptional art and design. "But we've still got plenty of island style here, really," Robert says. David and Sunny laugh and nod in agreement. Then David adds, "Aloha is always in style. That's our motto." The factory is almost insanely precise in its efficiency and cleanliness. Even the ink mixing stations are spotless. At the suggestion that this is merely because everything in the place is new-the business just started in January-David offers a challenge: "Come back in a year or two, and you'll see everything is still like this." Somehow, that's completely believable. All three men are passionate about their new business-to-business manufacturing venture, which you would expect, but they seem to be in absolute agreement about every detail of the demanding, apparently perfectionist track they've chosen to tread. From the simplest text-only designs to the most extreme, fine-line, multi-color printings, every shirt at Aloha T-shirt Co. models the painstaking care the three owner-operators lavish on everything they do. Meantime, Akiona has just begun to build a family. His first baby is ten months old. Shimizu has a girlfriend, but what he's building is yet another race car "from scratch." And Sunny K is still running the Sunny K store himself, still meeting people before and after movies, and when-like Akiona-they miss their movie. You get the feeling that there just ought to be a conflict between such a high demand for perfection in a business where much less is commonly considered acceptable, and the laid-back reality of their thoroughly Maui lives. Each of them has so much besides Aloha T-shirt Co. going on. No conflict. As they are set up now-relying on the training they all got from American Outfitters and doing the work themselves with a few on-call staffers-they can put out about 1,500 shirts a day. But, of course, they won't be doing that every single day. Each of them has his own idea of how to enjoy Maui, and these guys surely will always take time to enjoy the fact that they live in paradise. Aloha T-shirt Co. is located at 365 Hoohana Street, Bay 6E and on the web at www.alohatshirts.com. n |
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