As the year comes to a close, we love to look back and see which shirts were the most popular. Some of the shirts on this list were quite predicable while others caught us by surprise. This year we decided to rank the shirts according to print rather than print/color since the cumulative totals for all the colors made certain prints very popular overall. Here are the ten most popular shirts of 2022.
10. Diamond Head Dusk (blue, red) - Many brands have a shirt that resemble this shirt. When we launched our website in 1999, another manufacturer showed us a shirt similar to this one and confidently predicted that it would be a top seller to the US Mainland. And sure enough, they were right! This shirt by Aloha Republic has also been around forever and it is one of their top shirts of all time.
9. Ginger Orchid (red, royal, black) - This print is not a new one and has been pretty consistent over the past couple of years. This shirt will likely be phased out sometime next year. It comes in red, royal, and black with the red and royal versions being particularly strong.
8. Heliconia and Paradise (cream, black, red) - This print made its debut in 2022 and was an immediate hit, especially in the cream color. While we like both the black and red versions, the cream has the most visual pop.
7. Floral Garden (Sky, Navy, Red, Peach) - This shirt has been a top-selling cotton shirt for a while. And usually when it falls out of the Top 10, it is because inventory was constrained. That happened quite often during the depths of the pandemic. Pacific Legend told us that as soon as the shirts come out of production, hundreds of them get shipped out to various stores around the world.
6. Bamboo Paradise (Cream, Navy, Black) - This shirt is another recurring top ten shirt. It comes in the cream color below as well as navy and black. It is one of the few shirts where all the colors sell equally well. Sometimes the navy one is most popular, sometimes it is the black. But every year, all 3 colors turn out to be very close to each other in terms of popularity.
5. White Ginger (Khaki, Jade, Red, Peri) - This shirt made its debut in 2022 and was an immediate hit. The interesting thing about this shirt is that at different times, a different color would surge ahead of the others. The first to get hot was the khaki one followed by the peri (blue) one. Towards the end of the year it was the jade and red ones that were most popular.
4. Bamboo Garden (Black, White, Navy) - Of all the shirts on this list, and in fact of all the shirts on the website, the Bamboo Garden print is the most understated. All three colors feature a tone-on-tone look giving this shirt an understated vibe. Customers who don't want a loud in-your-face tropical shirt can turn to this for their more subtle approach to expressing their Aloha.
3. Star Orchid (Black, Navy) - This shirt usually finishes the year in the top 3 and has done so for many years. One reason is that an older version (and slightly different) of this print was worn by Tom Selleck on the original Magnum PI. And more recently, Jay Hernandez wore this shirt on the new Magnum PI. In fact, it is the shirt he wore on the last episode of Season 4 before the show was cancelled by CBS then picked up by NBC. This shirt also comes in a striking navy color and will come in a new color sometime in early 2023.
2. Ohia (Navy, Black, Sage) - This shirt really surprised us. When we were given an sneak peek of the fabric swatches by Paradise Found, we thought the shirt would do okay at best. But once they showed us the first batch of navy shirts that came out of production, we completely changed our minds. Perhaps it was because we had such low expectations, but the first time we saw the complete shirt we thought it was quite striking.
1. Magnum PI (Red and Black rayon, Red cotton) - It should be no surprise which shirt sits atop this list. There were days, even a week or so, where this shirt was not the #1 shirt. But over the course of a year, somehow it never fails to work its way to the top and usually by a wide margin. Both Tom Selleck and Jay Hernandez wore the famous red version as well as the black one in their respective Magnum PI series. The red one has also appeared in many other TV shows and movies over the years and remains one of the most recognizable Aloha shirts of all time.
