Kong Lung business owners believe collaboration is key to success

When Patty Ewing called a meeting this past Tuesday of the merchants in the Kong Lung Market Center in Kilauea, which she owns, the gathering had at least one distinctive characteristic.

The meeting was to work together to plan for a continued economic recovery at the shopping center. All six of the shop and restaurant owners who attended were women.

A couple of male business owners — in one case the husband of one of the women — couldn’t make it, but a striking thing about the meeting was that all of the businesses represented have survived — so far, anyway — the COVID-19 crisis.

In fact, Ewing said, only one of the businesses in the center has closed during the crisis, and the owner of that one had wanted to retire anyway.

Three factors seem to explain Kong Lung’s survival at a time when many Kaua‘i shopping centers seem like ghost towns, or worse. The 13 restaurants and stores there may not be prospering as much as they were before the COVID crisis hit, but in the words of Erin Descoteaux, owner of Sushi Girl, a popular food trailer that is permanently parked in the Kong Lung center, “I’m not making any money, but I’m not losing any either.”

A rookie restaurant proprietor, she hadn’t planned for Sushi Girl to collide with a pandemic and worldwide financial collapse. “As a first-year business owner, this has been a wild ride,” she laughed.

The first factor that may explain Kong Lung’s survival, Ewing and the other women agreed, is that it is in the middle of Kilauea town, immediately surrounded on three sides by neighborhoods whose residents depend on places like the Kilauea Bakery, which shut down for a few weeks during the island-wide lockdown, then reopened with limited service and hours, and has built back its operation so it is at least breaking even, said Katie Pickett, who owns the bakery with her husband, Tom.

The Picketts had planned to sell the restaurant and retire before COVID hit. They were even in escrow with a buyer, but the deal collapsed as the pandemic worsened and the Picketts realized they would be staying on for a few more years.

Katie Pickett said she and Tom also felt a responsibility to their employees, many of whom struggled with the state’s creaky unemployment benefit system.

Ewing and the store owners, said Kirsten Kaleo Hermstad, owner of Black Dog Gallery &Goods, quickly realized that collaboration would be the only way their businesses would survive. That, she said, may be where gender enters into the situation since, oftentimes, women gravitate to helping one another more than men may.

“I think men are trained to be competitive and women are socialized to be cooperative,” said Joanna Carolan, owner of Banana Patch Studio, which also has a location in Hanapepe. “Women helping one another out is ingrained,” Hermstad said. “These businesses are our babies, and we look to the rest of the tribe (fellow store owners) for support. It helps that we are in a residential and not a resort community.”

To begin with, Ewing met with every tenant, and worked out individual solutions for their rent payments. She’s owned Kong Lung since before Hurricane ‘Iniki. “I’ve been in business through two hurricanes, several floods and I don’t know how many recessions,” she said. It helped, Ewing said, that she is not burdened by the kind of crushing mortgage and other debt loads faced by many shopping centers whose very existence is threatened.

It also became clear that Kong Lung could survive on business from residents of Kilauea and surrounding communities. “Prosper” is not the word to describe it. All of the business owners agreed that the continuation of restrictions on travel to Kaua‘i may only postpone an inevitable day of reckoning.

Little things matter. Descoteaux, for example, focused on details as specific as the cost of small plastic containers in which she served sauces, and concluded they had to go. She cut down on portion sizes, explaining, “it used to be I’d be hungry, so I’d put more on the plate.” Hermstad interrupted, saying “you mean you gave your customers more food because you were hungry?” Descoteaux ruefully admitted that had been her unconscious thinking.

Hermstad said she realized that she and Lauren Frey Woltman, who operates Lolo On Kaua‘i, a clothing and jewelry boutique, could share one employee. Then Hermstad discovered that Carolan was interested in selling Banana Patch, so the two women agreed on terms that made it affordable for the gallery to change hands.

Katie Pickett, who manages the bakery’s finances, said Kaua‘i’s success as a tourist destination led many business owners to try to allow the wages they paid to keep pace with the rising cost of living. It was an achievable goal in good times, she said, but since COVID hit, “we realize we can’t pay the wages we’re paying without tourists.”

Most of the business owners obtained Paycheck Protection Program loans from the federal government, with all who did deciding to commit all of that cash to paying employees for as long as possible instead of investing in new equipment or business equity.

A third factor explaining Kong Lung’s apparent success may be that its unique shop mix — there are no franchise or national brand-name outlets — happened to play to the advantage of stores that create unique atmospheres that appeal to people who still value shopping in person.

The owners have not yet fallen back on the internet, either. Although Woltman had good luck for a few weeks with a daily Instagram feed on which she sold clothing, none of the other businesses has a meaningful internet presence. Most have learned to systematically track tourist customers who were repeat visitors before the pandemic. There are sales to be wrung from those relationships, Carolan said.

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Allan Parachini is a Kilauea resident, furniture-maker, journalist and retired public-relations executive who writes periodically for The Garden Island.