Kelp - Old Orchard Beach
- Brick + Tides
- Aug 5
- 7 min read
Three friends, two neighboring businesses and one very unlikely phone call brought a little West Coast energy to Old Orchard Beach.
On a rainy summer morning, Kelp feels like a burst of color along Old Orchard Street. A mirrored disco wall catches the light. Plants climb above shelves filled with candles, jewelry, books and locally made goods. A hat embroidered with a lobster promises “Catch of the Day,” while the words on owner Samantha Rush’s shirt offer an even simpler explanation for what she, her husband Levi Rush and their friend Gabe Kidd are building here: Support Local.
Kelp does not look like the souvenir shops that tend to repeat themselves from one coastal town to the next. That is intentional. Sam wants visitors to discover something unexpected, but more than that, she wants them to feel something.
“We’ve always wanted it to feel more like an experience than just a shopping trip,” she said. “I want people to experience coming into Kelp and feel creative, and to leave feeling inspired.”
The boutique opened in 2025 beside Café 64, the coffee shop the three friends already owned together. Kelp is now in its second season and the café is in its third under their partnership, but their story began years earlier and thousands of miles away.
It began with coffee in Hawaii.
The Hawaii Connection
Gabe grew up in Old Orchard Beach. Levi grew up in San Diego. Both left home for Hawaii, where they met while working at a coffee shop called Smokey’s. They learned the coffee business together, lived together and became close friends.
“We just have that type of friendship that we can jump right back in whenever,” Gabe said.
Sam, who was born near San Francisco, arrived in Hawaii in 2015 to attend the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. She and Levi moved in similar friend groups, eventually met and began dating. Sam graduated in 2019, and the couple later moved to San Diego. Gabe returned to Maine.
Their lives continued on opposite sides of the country, but coffee remained part of all three.
In San Diego, Sam often waited on the beach while Levi surfed or went lobster diving. The view was good, but one important thing was missing.
During mornings on the beach, she remembers thinking, "I need a coffee. Who’s got the coffee cart?”
Eventually, they stopped waiting for someone else to bring coffee to the beach. In 2022, Sam and Levi launched the Salty Seal, a mobile coffee cart that served pop-ups and special events around San Diego. Both had worked in coffee, and Levi’s other career gave them an additional advantage: He was an accountant whose firm specialized in the restaurant industry.
Back in Maine, Gabe had started Café 64 with his mother, Lisa Kidd, in 2017. Lisa and her wife, Deb Dolan, were already well known for building businesses in Ocean Park, including Ocean Park Grocery, Cottage Designs, OP Home and a bookstore. Gabe had grown up watching that entrepreneurial energy firsthand.
When Lisa began considering stepping away from her share of Café 64, Gabe saw the Salty Seal online and called his old friend.
“I reached out half hopeful, 90 percent thinking this is a long shot,” he said.
Levi came home from his accounting job with a proposition for Sam.
“This is a crazy idea,” he told her, “but what if we do this?”
Sam had met Gabe only a handful of times, mostly in Hawaii and at weddings. She had never been to Maine. Moving across the country to enter a business partnership with him sounded, by any reasonable measure, a little crazy.
There was hesitation, Levi admitted. It simply did not last very long.
“Within three days, I think, you had texted back and you were like, ‘Yep, let’s talk details,’” Gabe said.
In early 2024, Sam and Levi drove from San Diego to Old Orchard Beach and joined Gabe at Café 64. A friendship formed in a Hawaiian coffee shop had somehow brought all three of them to the same storefront in Maine.
“I’m still trying to figure out how I got so lucky,” Gabe said.
Becoming Mainers
For Levi, Maine offered something he had not experienced growing up in San Diego: a small community where people remember one another and expect to meet again.
“Slowly meeting everybody in the community is just refreshing,” he said. “The ‘Hi, how are you doing?’ definitely means something more out here.”
Gabe believes the Californians are assimilating well. He has heard a few “wickeds” enter their vocabulary.
Levi has found local surfing spots. Sam has made connections with Maine artists that even Gabe, who grew up in Old Orchard Beach and once earned community-service hours inside a brutally hot Sandy the Seagull mascot costume, did not know.
They also survived a real Maine winter, although Sam quickly learned that her Old Navy puffy jacket was not going to be enough.
The more difficult adjustment may have been the rhythm of a seasonal town. Old Orchard Beach can go from quiet to overflowing almost overnight. Each spring, the preparation is partly practical—ordering products and hiring workers—and partly psychological.
“It’s slow, and then you’re drowning,” Sam said.
The three now employ 23 people during the summer between Café 64 and Kelp. Some workers return from college. Others come through the J-1 cultural-exchange program. Former employees occasionally miss the place enough to return for what the owners call a “celeb shift”—one day back behind the counter
with the crew.
One of Kelp’s employees is known to nearly everyone simply as Nana. Her granddaughter, Savhana, has worked at Café 64 longer than the current partnership has owned it. Last year, Savhana’s grandmother, Beth, began working next door at Kelp.
On days when both are working, Savhana carries Nana’s cappuccino from the café into the boutique. Beth may insist that she has a real name, but to the Kelp and Café 64 crews, she is Kelp Nana.
It is a small detail, but it says something about the kind of workplace the owners hope to create.
Making Kelp
After their first season together at Café 64, the adjoining lease became available. The opportunity was extremely convenient.
“We always thought we could do a retail thing,” Sam said. “The space popped up, and we said, ‘I don’t know, it’s a little too easy. It’s right there. We could be our own neighbors. That’d be fun.’”
Kelp was born.
The boutique blends East Coast and West Coast influences, but Sam is reluctant to define it by one aesthetic. She cares more about intention—who made something, why it belongs in the store and how it makes a customer feel.
Some products come from small businesses around the country. Many are made in Maine, sometimes by artists Sam met because they simply walked into Kelp or Café 64 and introduced themselves.
Lee, a retired local man, makes rings from spoons at his home down the street. Brooke of Stone Donut Designs and prints her own stickers, sticker books and lighters, then delivers them herself. Katie, a Kelp employee and licensed home baker, sells cookies in the store and occasionally transforms the back room into a sourdough bakery pop-up.
“It would be a shame to not have that be the center of the show,” Sam said of the artists doing the work themselves.
That back room has also become The Cove, Kelp’s charm bar. Customers begin with a blank bracelet, necklace or keychain, then choose from small coffee cups, flowers, birthstones and other charms. Kelp’s staff assembles the finished piece.
The idea did not come from a trend forecast or business consultant. It came from listening. Customers repeatedly walked into Café 64 and asked whether there was a charm bar nearby. After the question came up enough times, it began to sound less like a request and more like market research.
Last September, Sam’s father flew from California to help her build The Cove. It has since become a place for mothers and daughters, cousins, friends and vacation groups to make something together.
“We just want it to be a memorable experience where people can come back year after year and be like,
‘This is something we did together,’” Sam said, “not just, ‘This is something I bought.’”
Heart, Backbone and an Eye
Ask the three owners to explain their own contributions and they tend to redirect the attention toward one another.
Gabe calls Levi the backbone of the businesses—the person who can nearly always be found fixing something, running cardboard, handling payroll or taking care of a job the others have not yet noticed. He credits Sam with the eye and creative focus that made Kelp possible.
“This would be impossible without them,” Gabe said. “It’s just two of the most outstanding people I’ve seen, not only in personal life, but as partners, too.”
Levi describes Gabe as a natural people person who can begin a conversation with anyone and lift the mood inside a hectic café.
“He’s like a breath of fresh air,” Levi said. “Good for morale, and just a good attitude.”
Sam has her own description. If Levi is the backbone, she said, Gabe is the heartbeat.
“He has this joy,” she said. “He just kind of brings you back down to earth and has this soul and spirit that reminds you, it’s just life. It’s fun. We’re having a good time.”
And Levi, she said, is the glue—the reliable one who makes everyone believe that if a problem appears, everything will still be all right.
The affection is real, but so is the teasing. Gabe refers to his partners as “these goons,” and the three move easily between talking about the demands of the businesses and making one another laugh.
They have discussed what another location might look like, either in Maine or someday on the West Coast, but there is no fixed blueprint. What appeals to them most is the chance to keep creating something of their own. For now, they are still learning what two neighboring businesses can become in Old Orchard Beach.
Kelp is the first thing they created together entirely from the ground up. It holds Sam’s eye, Levi’s steady hand and Gabe’s belief that an old friendship could survive years, distance and one wildly improbable invitation.
The result is colorful, playful and difficult to compare with anything else in town. It is part California, part Maine and part Hawaii, carried across the country by three people who trusted one another enough to say yes.
Sam offered a much shorter summary.
“We love each other,” she said, “and we have a lot of fun.”
Many thanks to Gabe, Sam and Levi for their time on Thursday, July 30, 2026 at Cafe 64 and Kelp in Old Orchard Beach, Maine.
Visit Kelp on Instagram
Visit Kelp at 37 Old Orchard Street, Old Orchard Beach, Maine 04064.