Picket Fence Florist: A Place for Flowers, Friends and Family

2025 SmallBiz Editor’s Choice Award winner: Owner Sadie Akamine has spent five decades in the “very emotional business” of flowers.

Sadie Akamine opened her first floral business 51 years ago in a 200-square-foot space at the Yogi Building on Kamehameha Highway in Kāne‘ohe.

Five years later, she moved into a much bigger space, her current location on Hekili Street in Kailua, across from Foodland. When you walk into her shop, it’s like entering a country garden, with wisteria hanging from the ceiling and floral scents everywhere.

Akamine says she chose Picket Fence Florist as the name of her shop because she loves country gardens and the homespun feel of picket fences. She says she wanted a “nice country place to have friends over” and was inspired by her grandmother who taught ikebana, the Japanese art of arranging flowers.

Her daughter, Asa Voss, along with her other staff – Douglas Scheer, Howard Souza and Kathy Piimauna – have been with Akamine for over three decades.

She says she works with over 30 vendors, some of whom are retirees who sell their own backyard plants. She is currently grieving the death of the “Pīkake Man,” who supplied her pīkake for many years.

Akamine says she tries to use as many locally grown Hawai‘i plants as possible but in recent years has had to get other flowers, like roses, from places such as Ecuador, Thailand and California. She credits other Kailua florists for their support in acquiring flowers for large orders. The different shops “help each other out on a regular basis.”

“The people of Kailua love leis,” Akamine says as she proudly shows me a bright orange ‘ilima lei made with more than 700 flowers. In fact, a third of Picket Fence’s business is creating lei.

Akamine recalls her first job, at age 19; she worked with Greeters of Hawai‘i, handing lei to tourists at the airport. “In those days, you could go up to people as they got off the tarmac.”

After half a century in the floral business, Akamine’s connection to her customers is what keeps her going. “You’re involved with births, graduations, weddings, people coming and leaving. We’re doing a lot of events, so over the years our customers became friends.”

And she’s found many ways to say thank you to her customers and to bring the community together. For instance, for 10 years on “Good Neighbor Day,” Picket Fence would give away a dozen roses on condition that “you keep just one and give 11 away.”

She loves “the immediate gratification” of seeing how her flowers light up faces and places. “This is a very emotional business,” she says.

And it’s a business that keeps evolving. Akamine hands me some of her latest “hits” – big coffee-colored roses. They don’t smell like coffee but they do smell amazing.