DeSoto Brown, of Bishop Museum, says bus
passes are an ideal collectible.
BILL Hoxie, a bartender by profession and a confirmed bus rider by choice, keeps his expired TheBus passes in the kind of deluxe clear pages generally reserved for choice baseball cards or antique milk covers.
"I just noticed that they had gotten interesting-looking and I thought it'd be fun to keep them," said Hoxie. So he picked up the clear pages at a sports-card dealer, and on the first of every month, inserts the previous month's pass.
Indeed, the passes in the last few years have become colorful and unpredictable, changing from a uniform, utilitarian look to something more like a collector's card.
According to DeSoto Brown, archivist at Bish-op Museum and an expert in Hawaiian ephemera, the new TheBus passes fit all the criteria as an ideal collectible -- they're highly individual and artistic, come in sets and in a predetermined sequence, are widely available for only a limited time, and then, most importantly, they vanish.
But making collectors happy wasn't the idea. Making counterfeiters unhappy was the idea. "It's hard to believe, but we had a problem with people making fake cards," said Bill Haig, TheBus' customer-services manager. "We even busted a guy at ..." naming a well-known office-supply center "... cranking out cards on the high-end color copier there and selling them for $15 each."
In 1993, Haig hired artist Sandy Hiraoka, who had won a Pele advertising award as a student artist. "When in comes to marketing, you really need a good graphic artist and designer," said Haig. "It's graphics that tell the public who we are and how we do our job. Heretofore, the passes had been drab and kind of municipal-looking. Hey, we thought, let's have some fun and make passes that have a Hawaiian sense of place."
So, for the last half-decade, the passes have evolved into the unique cards they are today. Twelve-month themes run from May to April, and Haig and Hiraoka are currently determining their next subject.
"Then Sandy will work her design magic on the cards," said Haig, pointing out that her work on the cards last year won Best in Show at the Pele awards. The year before, the passes not only won a Pele, they received awards from American Public Transit Authority and the Hawaii Visitors Bureau.
"I use the standard computer programs to design the cards -- PhotoShop, Quark Express and FreeHand," said Hiraoka. "We're also designing TheBus poster and schedules with these tools, and going onto the Internet as well.
"It wasn't really our intention to design these as collectibles -- it was a marketing and control issue -- but people are calling in to collect sets."
TheBus makes expired cards available in sets of 12 for $10. Before, they were burned.
Although the cards had been printed on the mainland, Haig and Hiraoka are looking into having them printed in Hawaii. The cards are printed on special tough "security" paper, with counterfeit-proof invisible fluoro stamps, and a silver-ink stamp that can't be duplicated by color copying.
Approximately 38,000 adult passes are printed monthly and 10,000 student passes, which are different. At about 4 cents each, they're twice the price of the old passes, and more than twice as nice.
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