Post #388199 by Swangulo Tikis on Thu, Jun 19, 2008 3:52 PM

I'll be 29 for another month, so there you go.
My parents were hippies and shunned the tiki stuff. That would have been more of their parents' generation, but even my grandparents didn't do tiki.
My first exposure that I can recall was at Disneyland's Enchanted Tiki Room. I have wonderful memories of that. The tiki love lay dormant for some time, then when my husband began carving tikis about 12 or so years ago I became hooked.
Honestly we didn't even know there was such a huge tiki scene till the last few years or so. I wish I would have known back in my drinking days :P

In my (still somewhat limited) experience selling tiki stuff... I have found that some of our best customers are kids - kids love tikis! At a show we did a year ago, a little girl came and bought a little Marquesian guy and proclaimed that she was going to make him a bed and keep it in her room next to her bed. That was the 2nd Marquesian we sold that day to someone under age 9, go figure.
"A Night At the Museum" apparently has a big Moai called Dum Dum - we hear a lot of that from the younger set.

Our daughter is already a little tikiphile - she could say "tiki" before the age of 1, around age 1 1/2 she began drawing pictures of "tikis" and just recently at 21 months began sculpting "tikis" out of hot pink play-dough (wants to be just like her Daddy). Her favorite band is the Martini Kings. This is just from exposure to the art and attending/vending events, no encouragement otherwise.
I believe kids are just naturally drawn to tikis because they are fun and playful-looking.

It helps that kids are welcome at most of the big tiki events (esp for people like us who don't use babysitters much and would not likely attend otherwise)... It's all laying the groundwork for future generations of tiki-lovers!

Terra
Swangulo Tikis