If the shirt fits..

Nadine Kam photo

From left, Riley Gallagher, Rick Ralston, Emily Umezawa and Shawn Zarko pose for photographer Dennis Oda in shirts from Rix Island Wear.

Crazy Shirts founder Rick Ralston looks for success again with his latest venture
 
By Nadine Kam 
nkam@staradvertiser.com

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Some people are just serial entrepreneurs, so when Crazy Shirts founder Rick Ralston retired a decade ago, one had to wonder how long that might last and what his next venture might be.

The entrepreneur says now that, "I'd just been enjoying life in the slow lane. It was always stressful before and I was enjoying how pleasant it is to do frivolous things.

"But I missed the excitement of business, the challenges, the stimulation of being creative, the feeling of being part of a team; I was missing all that."

Now, at 69, he's back with another clothing boutique, Rix Island Wear, which opened two weeks ago at Ward Warehouse. The small shop features contemporary men's aloha shirts, based on what Ralston was searching for in the marketplace.
"I shopped here and there but I found it hard to find really good shirts."

With an active, outdoorsy lifestyle, he didn't care for rayons or polyester blend fabrics, and said, "silk is nice for evenings but I don't want to take the time to take it to the dry cleaners. I don't like to waste money either."

So shirts at Rix, designed by Marcie Norton, are made of 100 percent cotton, meant to be comfortable while being able to dress up or down for multiple occasions.

"Marcie and I work closely together and we have a similar understanding of where we want to go," Ralston said. "We're not going to do typical seasonal lines. We want to keep it fresh, with new stuff coming in all the time."

If all goes well, he anticipates this will be the first of many Rix stores to come.
Although Ralston's success story began in the 1960s, with his one-man custom airbrush T-shirt operation in Waikiki, hanging out on the near-empty sidewalk where the Marriott Waikiki now stands, he feels success is not guaranteed because of his name.

Back then, he had no expectation of success. "I'm starting small again on a shoestring budget. The difference is I've got some help this time, but we have very little overhead. I work out of my home, and so does Marcie," he said.

As a result, a Rix aloha shirt is priced at a relatively low $49.50, and logo T-shirts are $15.

THE IDEA to open Rix Island Wear is not new. Ralston had been thinking about it immediately upon retirement, but he never acted on it while watching the oscillations of the economy and marketplace.

He says he started strategizing six months ago due to several factors. "The nest egg, the 401K are not what they used to be, and I'm getting older. I wanted to start something while I have the energy to do it," he said.

Still to come are cargo shorts, and attached to each will be a Rix bottle opener, reflecting one of Ralston's quirky obsessions.

"It's just a fun, silly thing," he said. "Whenever I go to a party, no one ever seems to have a bottle opener. I've seen people open them on a bumper, putting two bottle caps together, using chopsticks, banging them on a counter, or with their teeth. This way, they'll never be without an opener."

Ralston doesn't know if his new endeavor will ever grow as big as Crazy Shirts. For one thing, there's a lot more competition for clothing dollars today.

"The way that took off always amazed me, so if I do it again, I'd be amazed again."

Blast from past recalls origins of Crazy Shirts

Courtesy photo

Herbert Awaya and Rick Ralston hold up a sweatshirt that Ralston airbrushed nearly 50 years ago for Awaya. 

By Nadine Kam

nkam@staradvertiser.com

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For nearly 50 years, Herbert Awaya held on to an old sweatshirt, the one piece of clothing that reminded him of his youth.

"People look at me today and would never say, 'You look like a surfer.'"

But surf he did, at Canoes and Queen's Surf in Waikiki, and emerging from the water at a time when there were no high-rises on Kalakaua Avenue, he would look across the boulevard at the handful of artists airbrushing shirts for tourists.

One day, he stopped to have a sweatshirt custom-painted for himself, and on Nov. 2, he hand delivered the shirt, signed "Ricky 1962," to its creator, Crazy Shirts founder Rick Ralston.

His timing could not have been better, as Ralston prepared to launch his newest clothing venture, Rix Island Wear, which opened its doors two weeks ago in the middle of Ward Warehouse.

"I told him I was sorry it wasn't in better shape, but he thought it was in great condition, considering it's 48 years old," said Awaya. "I actually didn't wear it too often because it had my name spray painted in front in orange.

"Awhile back, I saw a story about Crazy Shirts and how Rick Ralston got his start, and I started to wonder if he was the one who did my shirt, but I didn't want to bother him. He might think, 'Here's this kook.'"

But eventually, Awaya said, his wife pestered him to get rid of things he didn't need.

"Only half of me could get into it anyway," he said, so he tracked Ralston down through the Internet, and to his surprise, Ralston wanted to see the shirt and recognized his "Quasimodo" design right away, featuring a surfer with his head down and one arm straight out.

"That was my first year in Hawaii," said Ralston, who got his start selling shirts to tourists in 1960 on Catalina Island. There, he met a girl from Hawaii who invited him to come over and check out Oahu.

"I thought, it's a resort island, too, why not give it a try?"

Ralston said he wasn't a surfer when he arrived, but, hard to believe today, tourism was seasonal in the 1960s, and after Labor Day, business plunged. "You could shoot a cannon down Kalakaua and not hit anybody," he said.

That gave him time to learn to surf and ply his trade downtown, where military personnel were also fans of his humorous, surf and hotrod designs.

"I didn't need much. If I had a bag of rice I was all set," Ralston said. "I'd paint one shirt one day, two the next, and the business started taking off. It evolved into screen-printing, which allowed mass production."

Although there's a promotional poster on Rix's wall from a 1964 concert featuring Jan & Dean, the Rivingtons, Peter & Gordon, the Kingsmen and seven other acts, with tickets advertised at $2 and $3, Ralston said he didn't go to the concert. "I don't think I had $2," he said.

The first Crazy Shirts store was a temporary one in International Market Place during the summer of 1963, intended to shut down at the end of the tourism season. Today, we'd call it a pop-up store. The rest is history.

The sweatshirt he painted for Awaya had been a source of good memories over the years, although he doesn't know what made him buy that shirt.

"I was 21 years old. I didn't have too much money for clothes," Awaya said. "I was more concerned about eating. In those days, we didn't care about clothes. We were happy if we had a clean T-shirt and rubber slippers. As long as the T-shirt didn't have a hole in it, you were doing pretty good."

He's worn many a Crazy Shirt over the years, although these days, he's careful to avoid those with funny sayings.

"I don't want people thinking, 'Look at that old man. He's lost his mind.'"