Spinning out

Remember Peloton?  In The Drum, Mark Ritson suggests the brand is destined to be remembered like Atari in the 1980s, Zima in the 1990s, or BlackBerry in the early 2000s—scorching hot and a cultural touchstone for a very brief period of time and then...oblivion.

Peloton still exists, but I'll bet you haven't thought about it much lately. It has been trying different turnaround schemes, like targeting men. But nothing is really working that well; the brand has been slowly bleeding out for several years. Ritson argues Peloton got its strategy backwards. 

Gillette famously loses money on its razors and makes money on the blades people buy to use in the razors. Peloton went the other direction. It sold plenty of bikes, but it didn't make usage a habit.

Everyone was buying Pelotons during the pandemic, but soon anyone who wanted one had one. And then the pandemic ended, gyms reopened, and people remembered how much it sucks to work out alone.  So they went back to the gym, let their Peloton subscriptions expire, and all those bikes became zombies sitting lonely in the corner of the basement.

The business model assumed everyone would keep buying the hardware. That assumption was wrong. Meanwhile, the brand missed its goal of building community and creating a positive consumer experience—even though it seemed at first like they had it right with the leaderboards and other interactive features.

Is there anything Peloton could have done differently when it was still hot? Is there anything it could do differently now to right the ship?