Post #40080 by aquarj on Thu, Jun 19, 2003 6:06 PM

TJ -
I dig cocojoes too, probably for pretty much the same reasons. To heck with the price guides that say the resin tikis are too tacky compared to pricey aloha shirts or porcelain hula girls.

Both Cocojoe's and HIP no longer exist. HIP went out of business in a warehouse fire that consumed the owner as well, so the story goes. I think some overseas knockoffs of cocojoes are still being made, by making molds right from the original tikis. They've got flaws and cheap materials, but I saw them for sale in the international terminal at the Honolulu airport. Two other old brands that aren't around anymore were PolyArt and McGee's.

Now there's a chinese brand called Chiefly that picked up the slack in the Hawaii souvenir stores. A lot of theirs are pretty cool, and some seem to make use of cocojoe molds. They've also started somehow doing mass-produced tikis carved out of actual wood, with significant variation from one piece to the next. Maybe somewhere in China there are people who go to a big workroom every day to carve out 8", 5", and 3" tikis. Hilo Hattie's in Kauai sells those, so maybe the mainland HH stores have them too.

Another current brand is KC, but they look a little different from cocojoes. They're plastic made to look like wood, and they're pretty easy to find all over the place, including online. Lots of the 'buy it now' tikis on ebay are by KC Co.

Ugh, what a collector nerd I am.

-Randy