Rent it instead of buying it.

We'd add: family means sharing. Nobody in a family buys their own tent for one weekend. You borrow it, clean it when you're back, and it's ready for whoever in the family needs it next. That's the idea Ohana started with.

Somewhere along the way, most of us got used to buying cheap things for the few times we need them and then letting them gather dust. The alternative has been around for as long as people have lived together. It's called sharing, and it's the oldest circular economy there is.

Ohana began as a university project on the Nova SBE campus, with surfboards. Students kept buying a board in September and leaving it behind by December, because selling it again was a pain, while renting one by the day at the beach was too expensive on a student budget. So we built a shared self-service surfboard rental on campus.

Soon more and more people asked us for more than surfboards, like beach gear. So we built a second Ohana product on top: a slightly different self-service shelf for everything else. It still sits on the Nova SBE campus today.

Two years and hundreds of surfers later, the surf rental had to move off campus, but people kept asking where we'd gone. So we brought it back as something new: long-term rentals with pickup, for everyone. The board is your baby for as long as you're here, without the headache of selling it or dragging it to your next destination, and you can swap it whenever you're ready for the next one.

Who's backed us