Anthony Duong has always worn many hats. Now he makes them. Duong has been transforming old material into custom-made hats through his Kaneohe-based company, Illikoi GOODS, since 2019. Before that he was living in the Bay Area doing just about anything and everything—photography, graphic design, working at a climbing gym, running a sound and lighting company. “All these things were super random,” Duong says, “but they follow the theme of doing what I’m passionate about.”
They also honed the skills that he now applies to Illikoi GOODS (the name is a hip-hop play on lilikoi, the Hawaiian word for passion fruit). He designs and sews the hats himself, a process that takes several hours per hat, then photographs and sells them online. He uses whatever material he can get his hands on: football jerseys, fleece jackets, rice bags, burlap sacks, firefighter jackets, USPS envelopes. “Living on an island, we don’t want to ship a bunch of stuff over here and just throw it away. It’s cool to remix an old garment that doesn’t get the love it deserves and turn it into something fresh.” But he never intended to turn it into a business, he says. “I just wanted to learn how to sew and make my own stuff.” Sewing isn’t exactly a popular craft among young folks, but he found the mentors he needed. “My community is mostly older aunties,” he says. “They taught me how to sew, what machines to get, how different fabrics work with one another. I take what they do and flip it into a more modern, younger type of feel.”
Anthony Duong (SEEN IN ARTICLE FEATURED IMAGE, ABOVE) is the creative force behind Illikoi GOODS; Duong repurposes old, often vintage fabrics to fashion one-of-a-kind hats. At right, a cap made from an old Kokeshi Rice sack.
Customers often come to Duong with clothes from loved ones who have passed on: dad’s silk ties, grandpa’s vintage aloha shirts, auntie’s favorite cooking apron. “Stuff that otherwise would just be hanging out in your closet, not seeing the light of day,” Duong says. “I won’t know the story behind them until they come back to get the hat. They’ll say, ‘This is actually from my uncle who passed away. Me and my cousins want to pay homage to him.’”
His hats run anywhere between $145 and $250—a lot for headware, but so far the price hasn’t deterred buyers. New batches sell out as soon as they’re posted on Instagram, and nearly four years in, demand has only grown. “It’s pretty much all I’ve been doing for the last four years,” he says. “Half custom orders, half stuff that I want to do creatively for fun. I think a lot of the support I get is from people seeing that I’m not a robot, I’m not a factory, I’m not a team of people. I’m just a guy trying to do something on his own. I’m not doing it big time, but I’m still doing it.”
illikoi.com
