Designing Hawaiian Print Fabrics

Aloha! Customers frequently ask me how we come up with the designs for the Hawaiian fabrics that we use to make our line of Wave Shoppe Hawaiian shirts.

A ways back I took a stab at answering thise questions with a post titled Hawaiian Shirts, from Conception to the Consumer, but after giving it more thought, I felt that I didn't really start at square one.

So lets rewind a bit and start with the picture of me eating pineapple ice cream whip (hey, I am at Dole).

While I look innocent enough with my ice cream and all, the reality is that I am thinking how cool this pineapple garden would look on a fabric. On one hand it's easy, on the other, its really challenging.

I eventually took out the digital camera (after I finished my snack) and started shooting some pictures of the garden and all of the different varieties of pineapple and surrounding Colors.

Not long after that the wife wandered over and said "whats the matter, you never seen a pineapple?"

Soon it all set in and she said to me "how much is this one going to cost?" (Did I mention how much I love my wife).

So once I got back to the mainland I sent the artist some of the pictures I took while in Oahu.

All I will say at this point is that I am very blessed to have so much talent on my team.

Pictured on the left is the rough sketch made from my photographs. FYI We will usually spend around 3 to 4 weeks on the sketch alone.

This space left intentualy blank (didnt have any more to write)

Pictured on the left is the completed fabric. So there you have it, an example of how I come up with most of my designs, which is now about 60% of our line.
 

Our goal is to produce 90% of our own cotton Hawaiian print fabrics for shirt production, as well as making select fabrics available for sale to the general public.
 

Mahalo for reading! Visit us at www.waveshoppe.com