Article by Big Island Now originally published on June 20, 2020 at bigislandnow.com. Re-posted here with the author’s permission.
Hawai‘i businesses have faced an array of challenges since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the resulting lockdowns and travel quarantines.
The Hawai‘i Department of Business, Economic Development, and Tourism (DBEDT) is creating the Buy Hawai‘i, Give Aloha portal, and will list local product lines on the website at no cost to business owners.
The Buy Hawai‘i, Give Aloha (BHGA) website will be a portal to facilitate shopping on the websites of local companies. The BHGA portal site will only share information about local websites, and there will be no purchasing or transactions on the BHGA portal site, DBEDT said.
The portal site is open to all manufacturers and marketplaces of Made in Hawai‘i products with online shopping. Only products that meet the requirements to be labeled Made in Hawai‘i, which are set forth in §486-119, Hawai‘i Revised Statutes (HRS), may be posted on the BHGA portal site. Companies listing on the site should have at least 75% of their total product offering being made in Hawai‘i, as per §486-119, HRS.
Qualified businesses must have the capability to take and fulfill orders online. All customer inquiries and communication will be directed to the company in question. There is no cost for the service.
DBEDT will conduct a promotional campaign of the Buy Hawai‘i, Give Aloha portal site, first targeting Hawai‘i consumers. Later, the department said, it will expand promotion to mainland and international consumers. A soft launch of the BHGA website will be in early July 2020. The official launch will follow in August 2020.
To view a mock-up version of the website design, click here.
To register, submit one photo and a one-sentence description of the featured product(s), a representative photo of the company website, and attestation that the product meets the requirements in §486-119, HRS, using the online Participant Registration form.
Once the registration form is submitted, the listing will be reviewed and, if approved, uploaded to the portal site. Businesses will be notified via email when their listings go live.
Any questions should be directed to dbedt.buy@hawaii.gov.
Photo by picjumbo.com from Pexels
