If the shirt fits, wear it

Lately we have been getting an increased amount of calls from people asking if we buy slightly worn Hawaiian shirts. The calls usually start out something like "I have worn out all of my shirts and need to replace them" and we know that somewhere during the conversation they will be injecting the phrase "rather than throw them out, would you like to buy them".

First off we only sell new Hawaiian clothing and we do not operate a thrift store. But for the life of me I cant understand why someone would ever want to part with something personal like a well worn Hawaiian shirt, especially if they were high quality shirts came from Wave Shoppe Hawaiian shirts, or another awesome company such as Kahala.

I must admit that I am fine with tossing all of the imported shirting directly into the trash, the designs and construction had no value when they were new. 

While for the most part the vintage shirts tend to stay put, every so often we will get a call pertaining to re-homing someones prized collection. I just cringe when the first words I hear are that that some of the shirts they are re-homing are vintage Hawaiian shirts such as the one pictured below.

Vintage Hawaiian shirt

I can honestly say that I wear my Hawaiian shirts until they will no longer stay on my torso. If the shirt still fits even a little, I wear it. When I do have a shirt that is ready to be retired (which is quite rare), I treat the garments disposal just as if it was the American flag. No way would I be able to simply toss my old friends to the curb like that.

Wave Shoppe has a lot of it's first customers and they tell us that they have been wearing their shirts for 11 years now and they tell us that they still get comments on how great the shirts still look. Not to be a braggart, but that's a statement a lot of shirt makers will never hear.

Men's Hawaiian Threads

This is the time of year that we start a review of sort on the current year clothing line, with he men's Hawaiian shirts section receiving extra scrutiny. This is not done by just one person, the entire staff is asked to reflect and provide their personal input on what Hawaiian shirts designs they think were popular, as well as which ones were not all that hot.

Yes, occasionally we put out a design that simply doesn't move as fast as others. Additionally lower sales doesn't necessarily mean it was a "bad print". Many of my personal favorites never sold in big numbers, beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but I can say that collectors and Hawaiian shirt addicts certainly knew a good shirt when they saw one

But today's post is not even about those shirts, it's about one of our most popular designs, the brown Hawaiian shirt with sea turtles

Part of the allure is that the coloring in this shirt is easy on the eyes and goes extremely well with khaki colored pants and shorts. While at first glance it my look a little busy, it's the fine detail that drives this one over the top. And then there is the layer of sophistication that airbrushed background, which we started using around 10 years ago, brings to the shirt. 

Keep an eye out for the new men shirts that we are rolling out over the next few months, they are going to look totally awesome! And the new Wave Shoppe Hawaiian Shirts website is now up and running. Please have a look around and remember to like your favorite shirts with the Facebook button that may be found on every product page. Mahalo

Labor Day Hawaii

Its already September with Labor Day is just around the corner, it's also one of our busiest months. Labor Day, the first Monday in September, is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers. While we work hard to sell all sorts of Hawaiian clothing, our line of men's Hawaiian shirts outsell everything combined. We get tons of positive comments on the awesome construction and fit, as well as our unique designs. We can only guess that everyone wants to look their very best and they do that with the help of Wave Shoppe!

This fall we are cutting and sewing some men's Hawaiian shirts with Plumeria flowers in navy blue and we are soon releasing our first burgundy colored design.

Some of the more popular colors have been purple, brown, and blue. Of course there are those ugly Hawaiian shirts that people seemingly cant get enough of. The shirts are made with all sorts of colors and designs, nothing matches, not even the shirt pocket.

We also started expanding the Hawaiian muumuu line with hot new colors decorated with plumeria flowers in 4 colorways, one being the ever popular purple. You will also find new caftans, as well as a few of our customer favorites

Also new for this year is a category called Accessories which will initially contain men and women's flip flops and tropical beach bags, something that we had many, many, requests for. Well that's it for now, have a fun and safe holiday!

Wave Shoppe Webstore Gets a Major Upgrade

Aloha,
Back when we started our Hawaiian shirt company in early 2004 there really was not a lot of web store options available to mom and pop operations like us. If I remember correctly there were Yahoo stores, Microsoft FrontPage and some other what you see what you get HTML editors. Of course you also had the option to code your own websites from scratch, but that was not within our skill-sets.

Earlier that year I was gifted a copy of FrontPage from a friend, not knowing what it was for I filed it in a drawer. But as time went on I started thinking about all of the sales that the website for company I worked for was bringing in. It wasn't long before I had the software installed and started dabbling with the features.

You may not know it but Wave Shoppe was primarily an automotive website that slowly morphed its way to a clothing only site. The automotive portions of the site went on to their own domains and a few are still alive today. Years and years had passed and Microsoft eventfully retired FrontPage and replaced it software called Expression Web.

We converted to that platform, but not without a lot of pain and agony, lots of things ceased to function with he upgrade. Over the years we worked out most of the major bugs. But it seams that in a blink of an eye the once shiny new website was over 10 years old and was really starting to show its age.

In June of this year we made the decision to abandon the original platform altogether. The Volusion platform we chose offered a lot of features to account holders, and ease of site management such as speedy product updating, as well as putting us in a better position in terms of user experience across all viewing platforms, such as tablets, PC and mobile devices.

Like all things new there is a learning curve, and of course a few minor bugs, but in the long run the website should stay modern for years to come.If you have not yet visited the newly designed website, click the following link to the homepage for Wave Shoppe Hawaiian Shirts

We have also heavily invested in new inventory, as well as shored up our always in stock clothing items. We have even added a few new categories, have a look!

Mahalo