Of course, the biggest hurdle wasn’t financial or technological. If
Peloton was going to flourish, it had to find a way to replicate the
things that inspire such fierce loyalty among customers of SoulCycle,
Flywheel, and other boutique fitness brands—that specialized, person-
alized experience where you get to know your instructor as well as the
folks exercising next to you. Peloton had to make every rider pedaling
alone in her living room feel like she’s surrounded by 60 other sweaty,
inspired people. And this, Peloton found, would be far more compli-
cated than simply filming a class and streaming it to a tablet.
→Not far fromPeloton HQ, there’s a block of Manhattan’s
23rd Street packed with boutique fitness offerings. Orangetheory
Fitness is to the left; a Rumble boxing gym to the right. And in the
middle is the Peloton studio, looking like just one of many. There’s
a small Peloton retail space up front, a well-equipped lounge
and locker room, a class studio, and a juice bar serving up $9
smoothies. But downstairs, in one corner of the basement, there’s
something very different: a control room with a complicated array
of boards and screens all lit up like a spaceship, manned this day
by three young women doing what I’m told would be the work of
12 employees at a traditional TV studio. This basement is home to
the Peloton production team, capturing classes that are beamed to
bikes around the world.
It didn’t always look this way. In the early days, a small office
with a makeshift studio—a 10-by-10-foot box with a store-bought
stationary bike and a single camera—was used to recruit and
audition instructors. “It was a janky place,” says Robin Arzón,
Peloton’s head instructor and VP of fitness programming. A former
corporate litigator turned fitness author and personality, Arzón was
drawn to Foley’s vision for Peloton as a way to improve lives, as well
as how the company gives instructors salaried positions and equity.
“It’s the best gig in the world,” she says. “But teaching here is
harder than teaching anywhere else. You’re a fitness authority, and
you’re hosting a television show while you’re working out. You have
to learn your camera angles, and you have to break that fourth wall
to engage with the thousands of people at home.”
To do that effectively, Arzónworks closely with Fred Klein, Pelo-
ton’s chief content officer and a media vet who previously led strat-
egy for Fuse. Klein assembled a team of producers, each of whom
works with a single instructor to develop programming. “A big part
of Peloton is achieving a level of collaboration that is atypical of any
kind of fitness environment,” Klein says. “To import a robust produc-
tion team from the television world, place them into a tech company,
and get them to work efficiently and happily with people who come
from a fitness instructional background has definitely required a lot
of determination and diplomacy.”
Every interaction a rider has with a Peloton bike is collected as
data that feeds the experience. The company is paying attention
to what songs riders like, what instructors they prefer, what type
of workout they gravitate toward, what ratings they give individ-
ual classes. Peloton uses that data to compare rider profiles and
suggest (and create) better, more targeted content. During live
classes—in which instructors and riders alike can track partici-
pants’ progress up and down the leaderboard—a community of
virtual friends develops. Instructors in New York can acknowledge
a rider in Boise, Idaho, by name, encourage them to pedal a little
faster, or congratulate them on taking their 100th ride.
But the classes are also designed to boost brand loyalty, capturing
that same feeling Foley observed in SoulCycle and Flywheel attendees.
As an on-camera instructor, Arzón routinely sees how this plays out
when her far-flung class members encounter her in person. “I’ve been
stopped at the Geneva airport; I’ve been stopped at Burning Man,” she
says. Just the day before, two riders flew in from Florida to take a class
of hers in person; they’d been tuning in remotely for three years. “A few
years ago, a woman handed me a card after class and then ran right
out. It was this long note about how Peloton’s rides helped her leave an
abusive relationship. I was stunned. We’re really delivering a life experi-
ence. And we can scale that. We can scale that life experience.”
This is the mission Peloton sees in Tread. It’s about way more
than fitness.
→ One afternoon this past fall, I head to the Peloton offices to get
a peek at Tread. It's not easy: It’s locked in a room accessible only via
facial recognition. “I tried to get in with a picture of my face, and it
didn’t work,” Cortese says with relief. With his supervision, I’m granted
access. Inside is a room, its walls covered with inspirational shots of
products and materials, and three MakerBot machines are 3-D print-
ing what Cortese guesses could be anything from weight prototypes to
unofficial toys for an upcoming office party.
And then there’s the treadmill, smack in the middle. Cortese, who
previously founded the now-defunct social network Proust.com, hops
on and spends nearly an hour talking through every painstaking
detail. It looks, frankly, like a treadmill—though a very nice treadmill,
with only one button (to turn it on), soft white LED lights emanat-
ing from two knobs that control speed and incline, and a 32-inch
flatscreen complete with a built-in sound bar. Cortese stresses that
each touchpoint has been obsessed over, tested, tweaked, retested, and
tweaked again. Its controls are meant to be intuitive; the slat-deck
running surface, made of carbon steel and thick rubber, is designed
to have less impact on a runner’s body than the flimsy single-band
tracks most are used to. There’s a secret storage compartment on the
machine’s base, for workout accessories or sneakers.
“It was always clear that John and his cofounders weren’t going to
leave all their eggs in the basket of cycling,” says Klein, the chief con-
tent officer. After all, Foley maintains his vision of “fitness as a service”
with constantly refreshed home equipment. The only question was:
What comes next, and when? Product development is slow and expen-
sive, and Peloton didn’t want to rush it. So for a while, it focused on
adding new programming. “The bike has been a sort of Trojan horse
that emanates other forms of programming,” Klein says. The company,
for example, has experimented with a small number of streaming yoga
classes, dubbed Beyond the Ride.
But by 2016, four years into the bike’s existence, Peloton knew it was
time to start working on new hardware. And there was no debate as
to what was next. “The treadmill market is five times bigger than the
bike market, and customers were asking for it,” Foley says. “And we can
scale the retail, logistics, and streaming infrastructure we have in place,
so we’re not totally starting from scratch.” Many at Peloton described
the treadmill to me as “obvious,” and a way to connect with runners
who don’t like cycling. So for 18 months, the company spent millions
of dollars developing the device—along with, critically, the experience
surrounding it. That includes a brand-new studio in the West Village
and a duplicate staff of instructors and producers.
By this past November, when I first see Tread, the Peloton team is
feeling good about it. They’re less confident in exactly how to present
it to the world. At CES, where they’ll debut it, instructors are sched-
uled to give a demonstration of the product—which seems simple
enough. But unlike Peloton’s bike, on which riders sit for the entirety
of a course, the treadmill’s classes require runners to step on and off
the device repeatedly, with weight training exercises conducted on a
mat positioned behind the treadmill. At a meeting of 11 staff mem-
bers, the concerns are many, and the conversation runs in circles.
Will audience members be able to see instructors if the mat is behind
the device? Should the device be elevated on the platform? Will a stool
54 / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / January-February 2018