Vintage Honolulu Broom Factory Hula Girl Label 🖼️ Hawaiian Chromolithograph Advertising, Honolulu Hawaii Broom Advertising Label #2

🌺 Who Was the Girl in the Yellow Grass Skirt, Sweeping Honolulu Clean?

There's a particular kind of everyday magic in old advertising art — the kind of image that turned a plain household necessity into a tiny postcard from paradise. Before plastic packaging and barcode labels, a broom wasn't just a broom. It was wrapped, stamped, and dressed up with a paper label pasted right onto its handle, and that label had exactly one job: make you smile, make you trust the maker, and make you remember the name next time you needed a new one. This little slice of mid-century Hawaiian advertising art did exactly that — a hula dancer, lei draped and grass skirt swaying, mid-sweep in front of swaying palms — and it did it for a real, honest-to-goodness Honolulu family business that swept floors from one generation to the next.

This is an original Honolulu Broom Factory label, out of Honolulu, Hawaii, measuring 5.75 x 4 inches (approximately 14.6 x 10.2 cm) — a compact, wide rectangle of a size meant to be seen at a glance on a store shelf or a broom bin. The artwork is a full-color chromolithograph, printed with the layered, hand-separated color technique that gave early-to-mid-20th-century advertising labels their bold, saturated look — a technique built from stacked plates of ink, one color at a time, giving the finished piece a richness that photographic printing of the era couldn't match. The styling here — the pin-up posture of the hula figure, the stacked sans-serif display lettering, the flat poster-like color blocking — places it stylistically in the 1920s-1930s era of interwar Hawaiian advertising art, the years when island imagery was becoming shorthand for warmth, leisure, and escape on everything from steamship trunks to fruit crate ends.

The scene itself is a small, cheerful stage set. A bright blue sky backs a pair of tall palm trees, their fronds sweeping outward over pale, rounded rock formations. Standing front and center is the hula girl herself: long dark hair loose over her shoulders, a red-and-white checked headband, a full lei of red and yellow blossoms draped from her neck down over a matching lei-woven bra top, a yellow bangle at her wrist. She's caught mid-glance back over her shoulder, lips painted red, one bare foot forward on a red floor, her yellow grass skirt swaying as she works — because she's not just posing, she's holding a broom, its yellow straw planted right at her feet. Below her, a gold crest shield bearing a numeral 2 sits above bold stacked lettering reading "HONOLULU BROOM FACTORY, HONOLULU, HAWAII." The whole composition is framed top to bottom in a border of green triangles set against brown — a repeating, pointed pattern that echoes the geometric bands seen in traditional Hawaiian quilt and tapa cloth work, giving even the label's edges an island identity. This piece is offered as new old stock (NOS) — never used, never applied to a broom, simply held back from its original run.

🧹 The Craft Behind the Label: Broom-Making as a Family Trade

It's easy to look at a broom today and think nothing of it — but for the family behind this label, broom-making was a genuine craft, passed hand to hand across generations, with real pride riding on every bundle of straw. The Honolulu Star-Bulletin profiled the business in a 2002 feature, and what comes through is how seriously the family took the work. As the article put it, watching the brooms being made made it clear there was both art and science to producing the perfect broom — and that while the raw materials going into a Honolulu Broom Factory broom weren't unlike anyone else's, it was the difference in workmanship the family stressed as their real selling point. That's the story this cheerful little label was built to carry: not gimmick, but genuine craft, dressed up in island color to catch a shopper's eye.

Broom-making itself is one of the oldest small manufacturing trades in America — bundles of broomcorn fiber bound tight around a wooden handle, the fibers flattened and stitched to create that familiar fan shape. It's a trade that traveled with settlers and immigrants alike, taking root wherever a local supply of broomcorn or imported fiber could meet a local market. In Honolulu, an island economy built on imported goods and small local manufacturing side by side, a broom factory making a genuinely local product — one that didn't need to cross an ocean to reach a customer — was something worth putting a name and a face on. And what better face than a hula girl, the era's shorthand for everything warm and welcoming about the islands themselves?

🏮 Honolulu's King Street World: Where the Factory Took Root

The Honolulu Broom Factory's story is tied to the small manufacturing and family-business world that grew up along Honolulu's King Street corridor, in and around the city's historic Chinatown and Kalihi districts — the same streets where generations of Chinese immigrant families built shops, groceries, laundries, and small factories after arriving to work Hawaii's plantations. It's a part of Honolulu's history that doesn't always make the postcards: not the beach, not the surf, but the working streets a few blocks back, where a family could take a trade, a little capital, and years of labor, and build something that lasted.

Old-timers in Honolulu's Chinatown will tell you that district was never just a tourist curiosity — it was, and in many ways still is, a living neighborhood of family businesses stacked block after block, herbalists next to noodle shops next to hardware stores, each one carrying a name that meant something to the families who'd walked those same sidewalks for fifty years or more. A broom factory tucked into that world wasn't chasing the tourist dollar the way a lei stand near the harbor might have been — it was selling to its neighbors, to the hotels and shops that needed clean floors every single day, on the strength of its name and its workmanship. The hula girl on the label was the flourish; the broom itself had to earn the repeat business.

👨‍👩‍👦 The Lum Family: Three Generations Behind the Broom

What makes this label more than just charming vintage art is the family standing behind the name printed across its bottom. According to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin's 2002 reporting, the Honolulu Broom Factory traces back to Wah Hin Lum, who arrived in Hawaii from China around the turn of the 20th century as a young boy to join his father already there. The same article notes a small, human detail worth remembering: that to fit into his new home, the young Wah Hin Lum learned English quickly and cut the traditional pigtail he'd worn on the back of his head — a quiet, telling snapshot of what it meant to build a new life on these islands in that era.

The broom business Wah Hin Lum built prospered and was handed down to his son, who ran it until his passing in 1993, and from there to his grandson, Brian Lum, who was still steering the family trade at the time of that 2002 newspaper feature. Three generations, one family name, one broom factory — that's a rare thing to find behind a piece of advertising ephemera this small and this cheerful. It turns what could be just a pretty label into a genuine artifact of an immigrant family's American — and Hawaiian — story, told one broom at a time.

💐 The Hula Girl: Hawaii's Postcard-Perfect Icon

The hula dancer herself deserves her own moment here, because she wasn't invented for this broom label — she was already, by the interwar years, one of the most recognizable figures in American commercial art. Steamship lines, pineapple canneries, sheet music covers, matchbook art, fruit crate labels — all of them reached for the same image: a dark-haired island beauty in a grass skirt and lei, caught mid-motion, eyes on the viewer. It was shorthand for the entire idea of Hawaii itself, decades before statehood, at a time when most of the mainland's only glimpse of the islands came through exactly this kind of printed art. Local legend around Hawaiian ephemera collecting holds that manufacturers of every stripe — soap, canned goods, matches, even brooms — reached for a hula figure because it was the one image guaranteed to make a shopper pause, whether they'd ever set foot on a boat to the islands or not.

What's a little wry, and probably exactly why this label has stuck around in memory, is the playful mismatch of the whole idea — a glamorous hula dancer, lei and all, doing something as plain as sweeping a floor. That gentle joke is baked right into the composition: she's dressed for a luau, but she's got a broom in her hands, mid-stroke, looking back at the viewer as if she's just as amused by the pairing as we are. It's the kind of visual pun that made mid-century advertising art so much fun to collect today — take the ordinary, dress it up in the extraordinary, and let the joke sell the product.

🎨 Chromolithography and the Golden Age of the Advertising Label

It's worth pausing on the printing itself, because chromolithograph labels like this one were their own small art form. Each color on this label — the blue sky, the green palms, the red lei, the yellow skirt, the brown border — would have required its own separate stone or plate, aligned by hand, run through the press one layer at a time. Get the registration even slightly off and the whole image would blur; get it right, and you'd have exactly what survives here: crisp, saturated color blocking with the flat, poster-bright look that defined so much early advertising art before photographic printing took over. Companies large and small across the country used this exact technique to sell everything from cigar boxes to fruit crates to, yes, brooms — and the surviving examples, especially ones tied to a real regional business like this Honolulu firm, are treasured today precisely because so few made it through the decades intact.

🏡 The Impact Today: A Small Piece of Hawaiiana That Still Sweeps In Collectors

Vintage Hawaiian advertising art — what collectors broadly call "Hawaiiana" — has built a devoted following of its own over the years, spanning matchbook covers, tiki bar ephemera, tourist brochures, fruit and produce crate labels, and pieces exactly like this one: small, local, commercial art with a hula figure at its center. What draws people in isn't just the color and the charm, though there's plenty of both here — it's the way a piece like this captures an entire era's idea of the islands in a single small rectangle of printed paper. It's local Honolulu history, immigrant family history, and mid-century American advertising art, all layered into one label small enough to hold in your palm.

🖼️ Display Ideas

• 🌴 Frame it solo in a simple shadow box to let the color and the hula figure's motion take center stage on a wall.
• 🏠 Group it with other Hawaiiana or tropical advertising ephemera for a themed gallery wall in a sunroom, lanai, or beach house entry.
• 🛁 Hang it in a bathroom for a playful nod to the broom itself — a nod any island-loving collector will appreciate.
• 📚 Tuck it into a curated shelf display alongside vintage Hawaiian travel books, tiki mugs, or steamship-era postcards.
• 🎁 Present it as a framed gift for anyone with ties to Hawaii — a family member, a honeymoon memory, a favorite vacation spot.
• 🖇️ Mat and frame it with a wide border to let the green triangle trim read as a border-within-a-border on the wall.

🎁 Who Collects These

This one draws in several kinds of collectors at once. There are the advertising ephemera and label collectors, who chase chromolithograph pieces from small regional manufacturers precisely because so few survive in this kind of shape. There are Hawaiiana collectors, building out a broader collection of island-themed advertising, tourism, and tiki-era material — matchbooks, crate labels, postcards, and pieces like this one. There are collectors drawn to company and family business history, who love owning a small physical trace of a real, named, multi-generation family enterprise. And there are simply people with a personal connection to Hawaii — family there now, a favorite trip taken once, a grandparent who came from the islands — who want a genuine piece of period island commercial art to hang somewhere they'll see it every day.

❓ FAQ

Is this an original label or a reproduction?
This is an original Honolulu Broom Factory label, presented as new old stock (NOS) — never applied to a broom, simply held back from its original printing.

How old is this label?
Its printing style — the chromolithograph color separation, the stacked sans-serif display lettering, and the pin-up styling of the hula figure — is consistent with interwar Hawaiian advertising art of the 1920s-1930s.

Was the Honolulu Broom Factory a real company?
Yes. It was a family-run Honolulu broom manufacturer founded by Wah Hin Lum, who arrived in Hawaii from China around the turn of the 20th century, and later run by his son and then his grandson, Brian Lum, carrying the business forward across three generations.

What does the numeral "2" on the crest mean?
It appears as part of the label's printed crest design alongside the company name — the kind of grade or house numbering common on broom trade labels of the era.

What size is the label?
It measures 5.75 x 4 inches (approximately 14.6 x 10.2 cm).

Why a hula dancer on a broom label?
Hula imagery was one of the most widely used figures in Hawaiian commercial art of the era, appearing on everything from steamship lines to canneries to matchbooks — a recognizable, welcoming shorthand for the islands themselves, here paired with a playful visual joke of a glamorous dancer caught mid-sweep.

Where was the Honolulu Broom Factory located?
The family business operated out of Honolulu's King Street corridor, within the city's historic Chinatown and Kalihi districts, long known as a home to generations of family-run trades and small manufacturers.