Lanai's furniture queen.

Lanai's furniture queen

Twelve years ago, Jennifer Weinfeld left her job at a personnel agency in New York City for Hawaii's sunny shores. On Oahu, she began working as an operating room technician at Queen's Medical Center, where she met her future husband, Bobby Tamashiro. The coupled moved

to Lanai, where Tamashiro and his family ran Richard's Shopping Center. But adjusting to the laid-back lifestyle of the Pineapple Island was more than the new Mrs. Tamashiro could handle. At one point, she contemplated giving up on the marriage and returning to a more stimulating business environment on the East Coast.

Then one day in 1984, after advertising an old couch she wanted to sell through the community center's bulletin board, Tamashiro was stunned by the deluge of calls. Realizing that Lanai residents were desperate for used furniture, she flew to Honolulu and purchased $1,000 worth of high-quality used furniture and shipped it back to Lanai. She held a giant garage sale at her home, and her entire inventory sold out in a few days.

Over the following months, her phone constantly rang with Lanai residents inquiring whether any more furniture sales were planned. That was the clincher. In 1985, Tamashiro set up a furniture brokering business in a 500-square-foot space in the rear of Taka's Snack Shop in Lanai City. In the course of a year, the company turned over its inventory 50 times, representing total sales of $120,000, and prompting Tamashiro to expand her business by an additional 1,500 square feet.

Today, Akamai Trading employs one full-time and three part-time workers, who sell new furniture as well as Maytag and Whirlpool appliances, household goods such as linens, rugs and lamps, and a wide range of gift and tourist items. Sales have more than doubled every year, with revenues of $320,000 last year. Tamashiro deals with furniture distributors from the East and West coasts and the Philippines, and owns the exclusive rights to a logo called "Pineapple Bug Club," which is screened on T-shirts that are popular souvenirs for tourists.

But perhaps best of all, at least in Tamashiro's eyes, she's having fun and creating her own stimulating business environment on the island. "Lanai is so small and isolated that there is no competition and I have a product that the community really needs," says Tamashiro. "In Honolulu, I might have been able to open a small jewelry store or (some) other one-item shop. But here, I have a whole department store."