How Onewheel 12x'd Their Ad Output in 10 Days Using Refunnel
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Campaign Results
Project Overview
Onewheel's early ads leaned on product specs and voiceovers, which failed to convert. The product was too unfamiliar to sell on features alone. Head of Paid Media Ryland Chin pivoted to authentic rider content, but sourcing and whitelisting it manually was brutal: hours spent scrolling Instagram for disappearing Stories, manual creator vetting, and every deal routed through an external agency. Result: only 5 creators signed in six months.
About Onewheel
Onewheel is a self-balancing electric board that has built a devoted following over the past 12 years.
The founder, Kyle Doerksen, was a mechanical engineer who grew up snowboarding on the west coast of Canada and wanted to recreate that feeling during his daily commute.
The boards are sold direct to consumer through Shopify, with some retail presence in the U.S. and Canada.
Ryland Chin is the Head of Paid Media for Onewheel.
Two years ago, when he joined, he inherited a creative strategy built on ads that leaned on product footage, spec overlays, and voiceovers, and it wasn't working.
That's when he realized he had to pivot from static only ads to Whitelisted Ads.
He decided to manually reach out to riders who already owned the board and asked them to create content for the brand and whitelist it for ads.
Two weeks after launching a creator Whitelisted Ad, it hit 25X ROAS.
A week later, it climbed to 75X.
The Strategy Worked.
But the process behind it however, was a nightmare.
Ryland spent hours scrolling Instagram to catch stories before they expired, then visited each creator's page to evaluate fit and negotiate deals manually.
Every whitelisting request had to be routed through an external ad agency, adding days of back-and-forth to what should've been a quick ask.
Six months in, he'd only managed to sign five creators.
The Switch to Refunnel
When Onewheel switched to Refunnel, the social listening feature started catching every piece of content about the brand, even Stories and posts that mentioned Onewheel without tagging it.
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When Ryland spots a promising piece of content, he uses Refunnel's one-click whitelisting feature to send that creator a landing page with a whitelisting offer.
The offer: If we run ads to your content, we'll give you 3% of the money we spend on ads.
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So far, 100 percent of the creators he has reached out to have said yes.
"Most of our riders are just excited to work with us," Ryland says.
After implementing Refunnel, Ryland delivered 30 ads in a week and a half, roughly 12 times the previous output, and videos sourced from Refunnel consistently get an average of 7X ROAS.
The Results
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