Cindy King ruled her own corner of the world in 2010. The designer started the year by opening her Acid Dolls boutique in the Royal Hawaiian Center, staging a couple of splashy fashion shows and collaborating with a number of fellow designers while simultaneously planning her nuptials for the following year.

She appeared to live a charmed life.

In hindsight, she looks at Dec. 26, 2010, as the beginning of the end of one phase of her life. That was the day Forever 21 opened its Waikiki store.

"After Forever 21 opened, everyone suffered, then Japanese tourism really went down after the (March 11) earthquake and tsunami." Because sales took a hit, she was no longer able to keep employees, and instead of concentrating on design, she ended up working on the sales floor with her sister Wendy.

King kept forging ahead, bolstered by a support system that included her fiance, until he got cold feet and started questioning their relationship a couple of months before their planned fall wedding.

That was the last straw. She closed Acid Dolls in January 2012 to do some soul-searching.

But don’t cry for King. The once timid, soft-spoken designer is back, literally stronger than ever, her confidence bolstered after recently taking second place in the figure division at last month’s Ikaika Bodybuilding Competition.

"Right before the wedding I hired a personal trainer, Shane Lyman, who specializes in training women for competition," she said. "I just looked at the boards of before and after pictures at 24-Hour Fitness, and for his girls the change was very dramatic.

"I started working out a lot because it was something to release my negative energy," she said. "Shane found out about my work and he started talking to me about making competition bikinis. Women were having trouble finding suits or finding someone who could customize commercial suits for them. A lot of them ordered suits online but because their bodies are changing all the time, they don’t fit well."

All the while he suggested she enter the competitions herself.

"I kept telling him I wasn’t ready to do anything like that, but he kept pushing me to do it. I said ‘nah,’ because I’m a low-key person. I don’t like to be looked at. Even at my own fashion shows I hated to come out at the end and always had to grab someone to come out with me."

While proud of her work, she was never self-confident, and was taught by her parents to be humble.

"I also spent time thinking it’s time for me to step out of my shell and stop hiding behind other people. I hid behind stylists, I hid behind my sister. It wasn’t good for me as a business person. I knew I had to learn to put myself out and be willing to be vulnerable."

It helped that in the interim she had joined her family’s book business, purchasing rights for Southeast Asia distribution. Her work involved traveling to book fairs and negotiating deals around the world, forcing her to be more outgoing.

"All that time I had already been working on myself and Shane gave me a lot of confidence. He kept saying, ‘You can do this.’ "

Last year, she surprised him by agreeing to help customize competition suits for a handful of Team Lyman members.

"I started by tailoring and fixing things they already had, blinging stuff because I like blinging everything," she said. "This year, he started getting more attention, too, because his girls looked better on stage. I was helping them and styling them for competition.

"So, new year, new beginning — I started designing competition suits and decided to compete myself and wear my own design. I thought if I don’t do it now, I won’t ever do it."

Although the 33-year-old designer learned to make swimwear in her classes at the University of Hawaii at Manoa more than a decade ago, she had no interest in becoming a swimwear designer.

"This April was my first time sewing a suit since then. Most of the competition suits out there are the same. I wanted to bring something different and it came easily to me," King said.

In echoing street style, she created bra tops with cutouts and added chains to a suit for a woman with rock ‘n’ roll style. Her suits start at $200 and top out at $1,000.

Competition tops are cut smaller than swim styles to show definition of pectoral muscles, she said. Contemporary swimsuit bottoms are cut boy style, straight across, but competition suits are hiked up on the sides, dipping in the front, mimicking styles of 1980s suits or men’s thongs.

"It’s so ugly but on stage it makes you look slimmer, and from a distance it gives you an hourglass figure," King said.

In back, ruching along the bottom also helps to show more of the gluteal muscles. In figure suits, straps form an "X" to accentuate back muscles.

King, who entered the competition using her Chinese name Pei-Yun, quickly learned the power of wearing the right suit.

"That whole time I felt everyone had their eyes on us because of our suits. I made them shiny so we would shine on stage."

She had that moment of anxiety and stage fright before her poses, but she said it helped that the woman in front of her had twisted straps and didn’t know it.

"I’m detail oriented so that really bothered me and that was all I was focused on, those straps."

Once on stage, the can-do, competitive spirit that served her so well in fashion took over. "I wasn’t gonna look like a fool. I was going to be the best I could be," King said.

The three main categories for women’s competition are bikini (a toned body with minimal muscle definition), figure (muscle definition, symmetry, proportion and femininity) and physique (big muscles and mass).

Within King’s figure division are three classes: short, medium and tall. There weren’t enough competitors to fill the class categories, so contestants were divided into short (5-foot-4 and under) and tall groupings. At 5-foot-5, King said she found herself next to the leggy girls in the tall group.

"I felt so puny next to them. But I went in thinking I was not going to place, so I just wanted to have fun and have that experience."

Before the Ikaika contest, she researched some of the competitors and was intimidated by one woman from Guam.

"But when I saw her she looked so uncomfortable in her suit. I used to dress models for fashion shows, and the girls who didn’t like their outfits would just stand back and look at the other girls’ clothes. She had that look.

"Afterward, she came up to ask who made our suits, and I was so happy she appreciated them. She said, ‘They have all the elements a girl wants.’ "

Three amateur Hawaii competitions are held annually — the Stingrey Classic in April, the Ikaika Bodybuilding Competition in June, and Paradise Cup in November — more than enough to keep King busy year round, and she has Lyman screening the women before agreeing to help them.

"I don’t want to have a bad experience because it might kill my passion again."

King’s second-place finish qualifies her to enter the USA Nationals next July in Las Vegas, and while she’s training for that, she’s keeping her design options open.

"Before closing my shop, I thought about what I wanted to do and being at the store selling stuff was not what I wanted. I like to make things."