Growth Cycle
PELOTON CYCLE’S indoor studio in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan resembles New York City’s other fashionably overdesigned cycling studios. The reception area is all clean lines, bright woods, polished metal, neutral colors. There’s an artisanal coffee bar. The place is packed with people of minimal body fat. There’s a gorgeous locker room, Malin+Goetz toiletries, and fluffy towels.
In the cycling studio itself, though, the similarities end. It’s more television production soundstage than athletic space. Spotlights hang from black, ceiling-mounted pipes above the 60 stationary bikes. Cameras are aimed from various points on the studio walls, and there’s one gliding along a semicircular track. The bicycles are, naturally, bespoke. A monitor on the front of each one displays its rider’s cadence (pedal revolutions per minute) and power output, and the resistance on the bike wheel. It also shows a leaderboard, ranking everyone in the room as he or she tries to keep up with today’s instructors, Christian Vande Velde and George Hincapie, retired American professional cyclists who between them have 28 Tour de France appearances. They’re cycling royalty, and they’re about to kick butt.
Yet the biggest difference between this Peloton class and every other indoor cycling class is that in addition to kicking the 60 butts of those in the room, Vande Velde and Hincapie are about to kick those of more than 360 people who are livestreaming the class on 22-inch, HD, custom-built, Android-based, touchscreen tablets affixed to their home-based Peloton bikes. Later, video of the class will be uploaded to the cloud, where it will join the thousands of other classes that reside there, waiting to be downloaded to the more than 30,000 Peloton home bikes that have already been sold in 22 countries.
The Manhattan location is a microcosm of what CEO and co-founder John Foley believes will earn Peloton Interactive a $10 billion valuation in the next five years. Peloton is actually five businesses. It’s a bike manufacturer; it’s a luxury gym, packed with riders for nearly every class at $30 for a single session; it’s a production studio; it’s a retailer with 14 shops, where you can buy the $1,995 bike, private-label athletic apparel, shoes, and accessories; and, most important, it’s a video producer. Peloton bike buyers pay $39 a month for a minimum of one year to access as
