What's Ohana?
Ohana started as a university project at the Nova SBE campus at Praia da Carcavelos, where we noticed how many barriers stand between someone and their first wave. Buying gear is expensive and locks you into one board, and reselling it later is its own headache. Beach rentals solve that, but the day rates make them too costly on a student budget.
So students bought anyway… a board in September, left behind by December because it turned out tricky to sell. It's a real shame, too, in a world where almost anything can be rented instead of bought once and left to gather dust.
So we built a one-of-a-kind shared self-service concept. Two years later it had grown into something the community really loved with hundreds of surfers, who kept coming back.
Eventually, the success of Ohana was disrupted. We were asked to leave campus. However, people kept asking where we'd gone, because there was still no affordable way to rent. With that much support behind us, we couldn't let Ohana disappear. So we listened, and brought it back, beyond campus this time, for the whole community.