Tiki history question: when did Orchids of Hawaii start their cookie-cutter restaurant trade?

My interest right this moment stems from my purchase of some old-seeming OoH lamps from a yet-to-be-determined shuttered St. Petersburg restaurant, details on that in this thread over in Collecting Tiki: http://www.tikicentral.com/viewtopic.php?topic=48614&forum=5&7

My next step in pursuing that mystery is to set some boundary dates. When was the Orchids of Hawaii decor-supply business active? I've always thought of it as being a very-late-'60s-'90s thing, but did it start earlier than that?

bigbrotiki -- I can hear you harrumphing about how OoH was part of the devolution of tiki, and more about Chinese restaurants than Polynesian ones, and you're right, but it's part of the story of tiki! And until Shitty Old Chinese Restaurants With Undrinkable Drinks In Globby Not-Really-Tiki Mugs Central starts, this is what I've got. Let's dig in!

Is there a prize?
I am going to say 1961

Well the kahiki lights I have are just like the ones you have and since the Kahiki first opened in
1961 that would give a date as early as 1960 if these are first gen Kahiki lights.
Will need to look at the few old photos I have and see if it looks like I can see these lights
in what I know to be early photos.

Maybe Umeone could ask her dad if he remembers going to Orchids of Hawaii for lighting.
You could pm her to ask Bill, he would be the one to ask and could at least narrow the time frame
down some.

Odd that you don't hear of or see more photos of these tiki places from days of old.
Too bad.

Good luck!!

Thank you so much, tikiskip! Boy, your lamp and my lamp sure look identical, other than the colored resin on mine, and they both look just like the 1991 catalog image from Buzzy. Those catalog lamp pictures were almost certainly not taken in 1991, they were probably reused in the catalog over many years, but the pictures don't look super old. I keep looking for minor differences in manufacture, since they appear to be handmade-ish, and with organic materials... I would expect a little more variation, I guess, tweaks in the design over time to change up how it goes together or based on changing source materials. Fascinating to think that you could buy pretty much exactly the same lamp, thirty years apart!

There's a New Yorker article from '89 about the business that would be worth reading. The daughter was 4 when the company started and has every catalog. From facebook it looks like she may be in her 60's?
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1989/07/10/orchids-of-hawaii
It looks like you can open the article for a one week subscription for a buck.

p.s. I messaged her of Facebook but who knows if she'll respond to someone she's never heard of.

oops... the business was opened 4 years before the daughter was born.

[ Edited by: tikicoma 2014-12-30 23:05 ]

Looks like The New Yorker wants you to sign up for 12 weeks worth. Maybe I'll see if the they have that issue at the library tomorrow.

Looking at the date of her high school graduation it looks like 1960 or 61 may be the first year of Orchids.

On 2014-12-28 18:46, tikicoma wrote:
Looking at the date of her high school graduation it looks like 1960 or 61 may be the first year of Orchids.

That sounds right to me, but who knows.
"your lamp and my lamp sure look identical, other than the colored resin on mine"

My best guess is that the resin ones may be newer, how much who knows.
I say this because my wife got me one years ago that had that look.
BUT my Kahiki ones had the same top wire that yours does.

Also could not find any of this style light in any Kahiki photos.
Only photos I found had only rattan lights plus floats and blowfish.
If you think of it the rattan would be more likely to break than most tiki lights.
Plus these bar lights would get some hard wear and tear on them, so newer lights
would be rotated in for sure.

This light you have would be one that would hold up well and you can change the bulb easy
plus you can clean it with not much trouble.

People who have a restaurant want the three features listed above after they learn
the hard way the things that are a pain to work with day to day.

So this does not say your lights are new or old just some insight that may help.

Interesting quest.
Good luck!!

tikicoma -- thank you so much for that awesome article find! My husband works in a library, so he's working on getting me that article. In the meantime, he found this one from the New York Times in 1991: http://www.nytimes.com/1991/08/14/garden/de-gustibus-what-s-that-duck-doing-in-my-drink.html

That article states that Orchids of Hawaii was 39 years old in 1991, meaning the company started in 1952. It also notes that the business began as an orchid import company, and only later expanded into cheapo drink doo-dads like drink umbrellas (the article states that company owner Ted Uchida invented the structure that lets the little umbrellas open and close). This answers a question I saw posed elsewhere here on TC by aquarj and SuperEight, who had seen old ads for Orchids of Hawaii advertising a flower business, and what appeared to be an Orchids of Hawaii-branded flower stand in an old hotel image.

There's no mention of what year the ephemeral drink garnish expansion of OoH happened, though, nor of what we're interested in here: when they expanded further into decor. This article is focused solely on the drink garnishes (with a small nod to mugs).

It's a horrifying reflection of its time:

The American Festival Cafe in Rockefeller Center buys orange plastic rattlesnakes to spear through pieces of lime in its margaritas, pink flamingos to set off its fuzzy navels (vodka, orange juice and peach schnapps), and red dragons for its frozen strawberry daiquiris.

"Presentation is definitely more important than taste," said Rodney Clark, a bartender at Tropica, a restaurant in the Pan Am building which garnishes its drinks with straws encased with paper fruit. "It sets the whole mood. Someone comes into a bar to have fun. They see something that looks pretty, and they order it."

I have a stomach ache just from reading the article.

You have unearthed some good info here Humu.
It may be a good thing to start a new thread titled
Orchids of Hawaii or maybe rename this one.

We may get lucky and snag a family member or
another person surfing the net who can give more info that way.

Need to find the first catalog and hopefully get a date from that catalog
to help date these lights.

At any rate I will add my lights here so you can see the other
light I have that looks like the resin one you have.

This reminds me of the old fact finding threads that Made TC great.

On 2014-12-29 07:52, tikiskip wrote:
You have unearthed some good info here Humu.
This reminds me of the old fact finding threads that Made TC great.

I second that!

An interesting ad from my Aug 16, 1952 NYC Guide book...as posted years earlier...OGR

All I know is that those lights that hung at the Kahiki in the 90s when I went there were definitely not first generation but more like 80s lights. My guess is that Orchids the flower company started expanding to decor like lamps and Tikis relatively late, sometime in the 70s.

This is a classic question for the elders at Oceanic Arts :)

The New Yorker article yielded little new. I seems to me that OoH started in Hilo to sell orchids and other Hawaiian gifts and had branches across the hawaiian islands and in Japan. The Hilo orchid selling business appears to still be open and an obit I came across makes it sound like the Hilo business has been open at least 60 years. The article says the NY shop opened in 1952 and an obit mentioned that the lady came from Hilo to NY in '52 to work there. I guess the owners of the NY shop expanded their offerings, creating a 'better' paper cocktail umbrella and invented a machine to make plastic leis that ran 24 hrs a day 7days a week to supply Polynesian Pavilion at the 1964 NY Worlds Fair. I wonder if the NY OoH started as one of the branch offices then expanded in the early 60's into tropical restaurant supplies but never took a new name? I'll never know until we see those old catalogs.

aloha, tikicoma

Here is an OOH brochure from my collection. I believe it dates from 1960 and is from the Hilo location.

On 2014-12-31 00:12, tikicoma wrote:
...The article says the NY shop opened in 1952 and an obit mentioned that the lady came from Hilo to NY in '52 to work there….

Does the article mention if that was Oda frpm "Oda's Exotic Hawaiian Orchids" ? :)

On 2014-12-31 00:12, tikicoma wrote:
...I guess the owners of the NY shop expanded their offerings, creating a 'better' paper cocktail umbrella and invented a machine to make plastic leis that ran 24 hrs a day 7days a week to supply Polynesian Pavilion at the 1964 NY Worlds Fair...

Important steps in the popularization of Tiki :)

Early Tiki establishments advertised that they offered fresh leis flown in daily from Hawaii, so the making of plastic versions is symptomatic for the evolution of the "plastic paradise" of Polynesian pop, which, as we all know and love, is all about artifice - but also for its De-volution, when things went too far, with making plastic Tridacna shells, Chinese tiles, and Tikis :) :

I am loving this thread, thank you so much for adding so much info, everyone! We're filling in lots of the how-they-got-started, but the outlook is still murky for my original question about when they got into the restaurant decor biz. But we're getting closer!

Sven -- OF COURSE! I'll shoot an email off to the Oceanic Arts gang and see if they can shed a little light.

I never realized they made fiberglass copies of the Chinese ceramic tiles! And by the looks of it, they really lost detail when they did so. Reminds me of the more modern OA Chinese tiles I've seen that were made from old overused molds that had lost their detail.

Anyway... back to the subject at hand. I too have some Orchids lamps and it would be fun to be able to date them. Sadly, no markers short of UL stickers that are also on Humu's lamps.

The lady who came to New York wasn't an Oda but Irene Yamato if I remember right, and the men who opened the shop were Uchida and Yamato. The Oda's had Oda's Hawaiian Exotic Orchids in the Hilo area that changed to Orchids of Hawaii.

The Oda family owned this business until it appears they sold it in '89 or '98, I forget which, but it continued to operate under the Orchids of Hawaii name.
It looks like the Oda's were growing orchids in the '30's possibly commercially by '41 but WWII put it on hold until it resumed in '46-'47.

aloha, tikicoma

[ Edited by: tikicoma 2015-01-01 23:36 ]

This is the light they had at the Kahiki auction this last time.
It sold for I forget, but it was high and you can have mine for that price.

Added a few more pic's.

This light not from Kahiki.
It maybe newer.

[ Edited by: tikiskip 2015-01-05 09:16 ]