Kapolei retail boom The $10 million, 65,000-square-foot Marketplace at Kapolei, a shopping center that started its three-day grand opening celebration today, is a first-time experience for many of its tenants. Eight of the 29 businesses in the center are new enterprises for their owners.
First-time businesses define
the flavor of the Second City's
new shopping centerBy Russ Lynch
rlynch@starbulletin.comThey are operated by people who ran part-time operations out of their homes or who simply decided to jump into the competitive fray hoping that the West Oahu market will prove right for them.
The new mall, just west of the Kapolei Shopping Center, has some well-known names too, such as its anchor tenant, Blockbuster Video, which opened in August, as well as Supercuts, a Ba-Le Sandwich Shop, Quizno's Subs and an H&R Block tax-help office.
The "mom-and-pop" stores add a new entrepreneurship, the developers say"The leasing is going quite well. We are about 80 percent leased" and it is almost all small business with a lot of local residents putting their savings and their homes on the line to make a start, said John Morioka, center general manager.
"It really ties in with what our original plan was, going out into the community and asking people what they wanted," Morioka said. "What they really wanted was a more ethnically diverse center," especially more places to eat, he said. Because the new Marketplace grew up alongside the Kapolei Shopping Center, which has a Safeway and a Longs Drugs on one side and the entertainment complex of movie theaters and a Kmart on the other side, it didn't need to seek big-name, big-space anchor tenants, Morioka said.
What will make it work, he said, is the presence of "very courageous" local entrepreneurs.
Filipina friends Julie Oasay and Zenaida Pagilao opened a Filipino restaurant, Julie'Z, after working for someone else's restaurant for years at minimum wage.
Sisters Douang Phommachanh and Phanh Navong, after some years growing fresh vegetables in Waianae and selling them in Chinatown, opened a Thai-Lao restaurant, Kularb Lao Thai. There is a candy store, a nail-care salon, a stationery shop, a craft shop and a gourmet coffee house, all opened by local entrepreneurs going into business for the first time.
There are other eateries representing American and Asian cultures, art and gift stores, a credit union a jewelry store, a wireless phone shop and others.
"My friends who are in business were telling me, this is not the right time to start out," said Timothy Chang, a former Korean Airlines departure supervisor at Honolulu Airport whose wife Tiffany works for Bank of Hawaii's Pearlridge branch.
"But I asked myself, when is the right time?" he said. He and Tiffany decided it is now so they opened their stationery store, My Paper Club.
They did not go into it blindly. From their home in Salt Lake they drove to Kapolei many times, sizing up the atmosphere. "I spent a lot of time going into different shops, seeing what their hours are, what kind of people shopped there," Chang said. "We saw it was a really perfect location."
Kapolei residents Raul and Annabelle Perez had been running a printing business in their garage, doing some commercial work and printing 29 weekly church bulletins.
Perez says printing really isn't in his blood -- he was on active duty with the Air Force and retired recently -- but he and his wife saw the opportunity to be the first printing shop in Kapolei. "If we wanted to grow we needed to move," he said, and they saw the Second City as a great opportunity.
They live there and besides, Perez said, he didn't like the commute to Hickam Air Force Base.
The Marketplace was developed by a partnership of Pacific Acquisitions Ltd. of Honolulu, Gresham Co. Inc. of Maui, HUCO Pacific Development Inc. of Phoenix, Ariz., and Honolulu apparel company Pineapple County.