April 6, 2009 Ohana Teams Up with Sears to Launch Online Rebates for Energy Star Appliances Where Everybody Wins
Continuing to revolutionize promotional marketing and transform the rebate experiences for retailers, manufacturers and consumers, Ohana Companies has been selected by Sears, the leading retailer of Energy Star qualified appliances, to design and implement an online rebate program to help educate and support energy efficient appliance shoppers about the millions of dollars in rebates that are available, and to make getting those rebates easier
October 1, 2008 New England’s Shaw’s Supermarkets Renews Agreement
“Shaw’s shares our vision for bringing better practices to the rebate and reward industry that benefit consumers, manufacturers and retailers.”
July 4, 2008 ‘Money Matter’ with Chris Quinlan
The group talks with Chris Quinlan, CEO of the Ohana Companies about rebate and reward programs.
May 10, 2008 Pay before News Story
Consumers are frustrated with the traditional model of product rebates. But handled correctly the rebate process can benefit everyone involved.
April 22, 2008 Ohana Goes Green
Ohana now offers their clients the “Go Green Sweepstakes,” enabling shoppers to submit their rebates online for a chance to win hybrid cars and other eco-friendly prizes.
January 9, 2008 Ohana Devises Better Online Rebates
Back when Chris Quinlan started his company, he believed he had a revolutionary idea. Now, he feels that the revolution is really beginning.
October 19, 2007 Ohana Teams with Visa to Transform Rebates
Ohana Companies today announced an agreement with Visa, a key building block in Ohana’s effort to move the inefficient and costly mail-in rebate and fulfillment process to a new business model where “Everybody Wins.”
September 14, 2007 Rebate Industry Expert Chris Quinlan
Frustrated with the broken rebate and reward model, Quinlan launched Ohana Companies earlier this week. The company’s motto is “Everybody Wins.”
May 10, 2008 -- According to Chris Quinlan, founder and CEO of Ohana Companies, consumers are frustrated with the traditional model of product rebates. But handled correctly, he believes the rebate process can benefit everyone involved, which is why he chose “www.everybodywins.com” as the URL for his company’s Website. His formula for everybody winning through rebates is a model that uses online submission of consumer data; information gathered at the point of sale; and payment via network branded prepaid cards for the benefit of manufacturers, retailers and consumers.
“With our prepaid partners, we have insight to see what account balances are left on the cards…Once a check is deposited, you don’t have a second chance to drive that consumer back to a store.” -- Chris Quinlan, CEO and Founder, Ohana Companies
An Idea Born of Frustration
The idea that became Ohana Companies germinated nearly a decade ago while Quinlan was running Wilmington, Del.-based Mid-States Sales & Marketing, a consumer products brokerage firm he started in 1991. Rebates figured heavily in his efforts to move product off the shelves for
vendors like 3M, Mattel, Polaroid and Sylvania at major food and drug retailers. But over the years his dissatisfaction with the traditional model of rebates grew. Consumers were frustrated by a process that was labor intensive and fulfillment companies that seemed to drag their feet in making the payment. What most consumers didn’t know was that the onerous process was intentional, according to Quinlan. The more difficult it was, the more rebate money went unredeemed, he explains. Unredeemed and unspent money in rebate offers is called “breakage.”
Industry research suggests that 10 to 15 percent of the money spent on rebates ends up as breakage and counts as revenue to the fulfillment house or is factored into the pricing of the programs they offer. Either way, says Quinlan, the traditional rebate model depends on it.
“From our perspective, the way rebates were being handled was so poor that we decided to take a shot at putting together an online submission process,” he says. “We launched it in 1999 and were the first ones to use such a process.”
Quinlan patented the online process and, over the next few years, began marketing it to retailers and vendors. While it eliminated cut-and-paste work associated with clipping UPCs or “proofs-ofpurchase,” he knew it didn’t address the main question asked by those trying to redeem a rebate:
“Where’s my money?” And, dissatisfied customers were a problem for the manufacturers that made the products and the retailers that sold them. Quinlan was convinced there was an opportunity to improve the relationship among all interested parties: manufacturers, retailers, fulfillment companies and consumers. Having access to information on the fulfillment side was the key. He felt there was an untapped opportunity for vendors and retailers if the consumer actually received everything that was promised. But breakage was so ingrained in the rebate industry there wasn’t even a word to describe what he wanted to do. So he made one up: “spendage.”
Everybody Really Does Win
In 2007, Ohana Companies launched as the first fulfillment house that rejected breakage as a business model and subscribed to a new one centered on spendage. Instead of relying on breakage, what if the company ensured consumers got every dollar that was coming to them and also received offers and incentives to spend the rebates on additional products from the same manufacturer or retailer? The key was tracking what and where the product was bought and who bought it. And, adding prepaid cards as the payment method offered a more flexible option for consumers and generated even more information and important additional opportunities.
“I knew you could get all the information that you needed from the point-of-sale systems,” says Quinlan. “The idea that the rebate fulfillment side and the retail side weren’t speaking was the ‘Aha!’ for me.” He explains that if you could marry the information gathered at the point of sale to the fulfillment side, you’d have a couple of unique propositions. First, consumers wouldn’t be required to cut UPC codes from boxes or rip apart manuals. Second, vendors would get a better picture of the return on investment from the rebate because they would be able to tell how much was sold and, using prepaid cards, how much was redeemed. In addition, prepaid cards are key to the enhanced process as they provide another touch point with consumers even after they have redeemed a portion of their rebate.
“With our prepaid partners, we have insight to see what account balances are left on the cards,” he says. “We can e-mail additional offers to consumers from the vendor or retailer to actually drive ‘spendage’ on the card. Once a check is deposited, you don’t have a second chance to
drive that consumer back to a store.”
Quinlan calls the process and the patented technology that makes it possible, Return of Customer Spend. The RoCS platform is the basis of his assertion that at Ohana, everybody wins. It works like this. A customer buys a Hewlett-Packard laptop at Circuit City, for example. The customer registers for the rebate at circuitcity.com and receives a network branded prepaid card worth $80. From this transaction, Ohana gets three pieces of data: demographic information from the online registration, purchase data from the POS system and the dollar amount of the rebate. Ohana knows what was purchased but--just as importantly--what wasn’t. So, along with the rebate card, the consumer receives an offer to purchase an extended warranty and a laptop case from Circuit City. Later, as the balance on the card dwindles, Ohana can follow up with an offer for a less expensive product like writable CDs. According to Quinlan, the manufacturer wins by using the rebate card to incent the consumer to buy the H-P laptop; the consumer wins because the rebate was easy to claim and he/she received a value-added offer; and Circuit City wins because it generated incremental sales from the initial purchase.
Quinlan says breakage is useless to him. It’s not the kind of revenue that makes the model work for Ohana. He assures the manufacturers and retailers on his client roster that their customers will get their rebates quickly. Instead of relying on the 10 to 15 percent of unspent card value as part of its profit model, Ohana charges clients a transaction fee to process the rebate and a “success fee” for driving sales. Quinlan says, on average, for every dollar a vendor or retailer spends on a rebate program, Ohana funnels 40 cents back to them in the form of additional sales.
Exclusive Arrangement with Visa
Last October, Ohana signed an agreement with Visa to issue its rebates exclusively with Visa prepaid cards or Visa virtual accounts. According to Quinlan, Ohana’s model was one of the main reasons Visa was eager to become a partner. “They understand the dollars that are unspent on the card don’t benefit them at all,” he says. “They like our platform because we try to drive consumers to spend as much of their rebate as possible.”
According to Quinlan, Ohana has clients in many markets. He says the platform is in grocery, drug and consumer electronics and hints that home improvement and online retailers could appear soon on Ohana’s client roster. Whatever industry it serves, Ohana isn’t doing it like the rest of the fulfillment business. Quinlan is not afraid to see consumers get the money they’re entitled to. In fact, he counts on it. Because if they don’t get it, they can’t spend it! Paybefore)
Ohana Companies has virtually eliminated the inefficient and costly mail-in rebate and fulfillment process by offering the first 100-percent online solution to redeem, validate and fulfill rebates electronically. The company’s team of innovative executives, with considerable retail, marketing, financial services and technology industry expertise, have come together to transform the broken rebate model that’s been frustrating consumers, retailers and manufacturers for decades. Ohana utilizes revolutionary, patented and patent-pending technology and processes, changing the way consumers, retailers and manufacturers participate in rebates and promotional marketing, ensuring that “Everybody Wins.”
April 29, 2010 
