Kalākaua Avenue has long occupied a particular position in retail, the Rodeo Drive of Hawaii, an address that belongs in the same conversation as Fifth Avenue, Ginza, the Champs-Élysées, Via Montenapoleone and the Magnificent Mile. On streets like these, tenancy carries meaning on its own.
The luxury flagships that built that reputation are still in place. What has changed over roughly the last five to seven years is what sits alongside them, and the resulting mix does more work than either component would on its own.
The flagship era
The established model was straightforward and highly effective. Tiffany, Hermès, Gucci, Bottega Veneta, Harry Winston, the global luxury names took flagship positions along Kalākaua Avenue, serving a visitor base weighted heavily toward Japan and the wider Asia-Pacific region with substantial disposable income.
For an owner assembling a tenant mix, the calculation was uncomplicated. Those tenants paid the largest rents, brought their own marketing, and carried names that functioned as destination signals.
That segment remains a foundation of the market. “They’re the ones that can pay the big rents, and they have the big name and the big marketing,” says Erin W.J. Mitsuyoshi, CCIM, of The Bratton Team at Colliers International Hawaii. The change is not that flagships receded. It is that a second tier grew up around them.
What visitors are buying now
The shift, accelerating from around the pandemic period onward, is toward the specific and the local.
Visitors increasingly want items that showcase Hawaii and Hawaiian culture and are only available in Hawaii, which by definition excludes the international luxury brands stocked in every major city. A personalized hat, a print shirt, a charm bracelet tied to Hawaiian design, products carrying a provenance that cannot be replicated elsewhere, in formats that pack easily for the journey back.
Food gifts have followed the same pattern. Cookies and confections built around local flavors such as lilikoi (passion fruit), guava, and pineapple carry an immediate association with the place, which is precisely what makes a gift work.
For landlords, the effect has been a broader pool of viable tenants. Local entrepreneurs who a decade ago had limited access to prime retail have found a platform, and the demand supporting them is visitor demand rather than a niche.
The food and beverage story
The parallel development in dining has come from the same direction, and its foundations were laid earlier.
Alan Wong and Roy Yamaguchi established the model: Pacific Rim cuisine built on local ingredients, executed to a standard that traveled internationally. Their influence is visible in a generation of operators who treat Hawaiian agriculture as the starting point rather than a garnish, and in groups like Merriman’s that emphasize quality at a price point reachable for residents marking an occasion, not only for visitors.
What that has produced is a working relationship between hotel and resort dining and the state’s farms and growers. Menus follow what is actually being grown, supporting producers directly and giving operators a genuine seasonal story.
A widening palate has arrived alongside it. Istanbul Hawaii, the women-led Turkish-Mediterranean restaurant in Ward Village, grew from a farmers market operation into one of Honolulu’s more established dining rooms, the kind of trajectory that would have been harder to imagine when the market’s dining was concentrated more narrowly. Younger, well-traveled diners have driven demand for fusion approaches that modernize traditional dishes, producing food that is recognizable and new at once.
Rhythm and composition
Two structural features shape how the mix gets assembled.
The first is seasonality. Summer and winter are the strong periods, with softer stretches between them when school calendars pull families home. Conventions and conferences fill part of that gap, and events such as RIMPAC bring significant additional volume. Operators who plan inventory around that rhythm, fully stocked and well merchandised entering peak periods, capture the demand when it arrives.
The second is the composition of spend, and the scale involved is easy to underestimate: Waikiki alone accounts for roughly eight percent of Hawaii’s gross domestic product, on the order of five billion dollars. That spending is overwhelmingly visitor-driven, which Mitsuyoshi estimates at around eighty-five percent.
Residents shop the same brands elsewhere on the island, at Ala Moana and in town, and come into Waikiki mainly for occasions. That concentration is a planning input, not a weakness. It tells an owner precisely who the tenant mix is being built for.
The same logic applies on the neighboring islands with different volumes. Close to seven in ten of Hawaii’s roughly 1.4 million residents live on Oahu, and most visitors arrive through it, but a substantial share travel on to Maui or the Big Island. Foot traffic there is lower, and repeat frequency is higher: a guest staying four or five nights may spend within the same complex four or five times, which puts a premium on getting the daily rhythm of the offer right.
Where the format is going
Experiential formats have started appearing in Waikiki, following a pattern established in mainland shopping centers, simulators and similar attractions that extend the time people spend in a building and feed the tenants around them. The clearest recent example is Meta Lab Waikīkī, which opened at 2220 Kalākaua Avenue in a former Dior space, a hands-on store built around AI glasses and virtual reality rather than around merchandise on a rail, fitted out with furniture from an Oʻahu craftsman.
Mitsuyoshi’s read is that these will complement the existing mix rather than displace it, and that the local component holds its strength over the next five years, because the underlying preference for something unavailable elsewhere is not a trend.
The organizing principle across all of it is complementarity, a mix in which diners shop, and shoppers dine, and each tenant benefits from the traffic the others generate. Owners applying that test are finding it holds across formats, from luxury flagship to first-time local operator. Current retail and commercial inventory and the monthly Hawaii market statistics offer a running picture of how that composition is settling.
About the Expert: Erin W.J. Mitsuyoshi (B), CCIM, is Associate Vice President with The Bratton Team at Colliers International Hawaii in Honolulu, specializing in retail leasing and landlord representation.
The Bratton Team is a Hawaii commercial real estate and investment sales group, exclusively contracted to Colliers International HI, LLC. Led by Mark D. Bratton (R) CCIM and Mike Perkins (S), the team has advised buyers and sellers across all Hawaii asset classes for 40 years.
