TheBuzz Erika Engle

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Since the shoe fits, Ala Moana is wearing it

SHOE-AH-OH-WOW, British shoemaker C&J Clark Ltd. will open its first full-line store in Hawaii, at Ala Moana Center, later this month.

It has a Clarks Bostonian Outlet store at Waikele Premium Outlets, opened in June 2004. It sells men's shoes, including a lace-up Oxford named, "Trump."

Hmm.

The Waikele store is an outlet-type store where prices are below regular retail for usually offseason merchandise.

However, the Clarks opening at Ala Moana, on the third level near Escada, "will have all the newest inventory and styles," said Erica Neves, Ala Moana director of tourism. Sandals, shoes and boots for men and women in various degrees of dressiness.

The company Web site indicates that company-owned stores stock the complete line of Clarks, Privo, Indigo and Clarks Originals footwear, including the "Wallabee" style created and first popularized in the mid 1960s. Think, ankle-high suede, lace-up with a crepe sole.

Clarks also sells some of its lines of shoes through other retailers, as well as online.

Hawaii retailers who carry some of the shoes include the Walking Co. at Ala Moana Center; Nordstrom in the Ward complex; and in Waikiki at O My Sole on Kalakaua Avenue and Pipeline Leather, on Kaiulani Avenue.

Ice cream wars

Ala Moana is also welcoming a national ice cream chain's first foray into the islands.

Without engaging in silly puns about ice cream wars heating up -- oops -- Marble Slab Ice Creamery will be opening this month on the street level outside the Makai Market Food Court, near Splash Hawaii.

Marble Slab's concept is familiar to anyone who has visited its chief competitor, Cold Stone Creamery.

Ironically, Marble Slab was founded in Houston in 1983, while the now-better-known and more-prolific Cold Stone was founded five years later, in 1988, in Tempe, Ariz.

Cold Stone claims more than 1,000 stores with more than 1,000 more in development -- while Marble Slab boasts 267 stores open and 154 in development.

Cold Stone is already a tenant of General Growth Properties Inc., in its Ward Entertainment Complex.

"Marble Slab approached Ala Moana. It wanted to enter the marketplace and we did have a space that it liked, outside Food Court," Neves said.

Pitchers, take note

TheBuzz, and probably other points of media contact and reporting, has been receiving increasing numbers of e-mails from publicists and other story-pitchers that merely instruct the recipient to "please review the attached," often with no indication of what "the attached" is about.

Harrumph. Harrumph I say!

Have you not heard about all those nasty viruses out there?

You're sending an unsolicited e-mail to someone with a Word document or other form of attachment with no explanation of what it's about, and you expect the recipient to open it?

Whaddayounuts? (alternately, What'reyounuts?)

The Star-Bulletin newsroom, along with many others, run Macs.

Ok, so Macs generally don't get viruses, but that's not really the point.

Please, have a heart.

Just paste the text into the e-mails you send ... and your columnist will be less likely to, oops, delete.