BELLEVUE, Wash. -- Coinstar Inc. recently appointed Gregg Kaplan, former CEO of Redbox Automated Retail LLC, to the positions of president and COO of Coinstar, succeeding Paul D. Davis. Consistent with the leadership succession plan previously announced on Sept. 2, 2008, Paul Davis became CEO and was named to Coinstar's board, effective April 1, 2009. Davis has served as Coinstar's COO since April 2008 and succeeds Dave Cole, who retired as CEO and Coinstar director.
Kaplan will have responsibility for all of Coinstar's lines of business and functional areas including operations, [image-nocss] sales, manufacturing, supply chain, customer service and R&D, and will report directly to Paul Davis.
"[Kaplan is] an experienced and innovative executive having pioneered the self-service DVD rental category and grown Redbox from a startup in 2002 to the leader in the category, with a network of 14,000 kiosks in 48 states," said Davis. "His extensive knowledge of self-service operations and product expansion will be a great asset to the company, and we look forward to his continued contributions across all of our businesses."
John Harvey, CFO of Redbox, will succeed Brian Turner, CFO of Coinstar, starting on June 1, 2009. Turner has elected to leave the company after six years of service. Mitch Lowe, COO of Redbox, will take over the leadership of Redbox in the role of president. Lowe was one of the founding senior executives at Netflix and has been a leader in the video and rental industry for more than 25 years.
Kaplan, 39, has run Redbox since its infancy in 2002 when it was a venture within McDonald's Corp., and has served as Redbox's CEO since 2005, when Redbox became a separate company. Over the six-plus years of running Redbox, he drove the rapid expansion of Redbox from just a few kiosks to a network of more than 14,000. He was also responsible for building the entire management team and growing the employee base from five people to over 1,200 employees. Prior to Redbox, Kaplan worked in the strategy and business development group of McDonald's. Other experience includes serving as a partner at divine interVentures, a B2B internet incubator; strategic positions at Streamline.com, an online grocery delivery startup; and an investment banker at Furman Selz, focusing on corporate transactions of media and entertainment companies.
Harvey, 43, has served as CFO for Redbox since May 2008. Before joining Redbox, he was executive vice president and CFO for JetBlue Airways Corp. His prior positions include serving as senior vice president of SkyWorks Capital LLC; vice president and senior portfolio manager of ABN AMRO Bank; senior director corporate finance for America West Airlines and manager, corporate finance for Southwest Airlines. Harvey began his career as a staff accountant for Ernst & Young.
Lowe, 56, has served as COO at Redbox since May 2005. He helped build a strong management team at Redbox that grew the Redbox network from 12 kiosks to more than 14,000 and was instrumental in developing the concept of $1 per night new release DVD rentals. Prior to this role, Lowe consulted for McDonald's business development group, focusing on automated vending machines, and in May 2003, became head of operations for McDonald's redbox DVD vending machine team. Prior to McDonald's, Lowe was a founding executive at Netflix in 1998, and served as the entertainment domain expert and vice president of business development and strategic alliances from 1998 to 2003.
Bellevue, Wash.-based Coinstar Inc. is a multi-national company offering a range of "4th Wall" solutions for the retailers' front of store consisting of self-service coin counting, DVD rental, money transfer, electronic payment solutions and entertainment services. The company's products and services can be found at more than 90,000 points of presence including supermarkets, drug stores, mass merchants, financial institutions, convenience stores, restaurants and money transfer agent locations.
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