Mark Ritson says Peloton has died not once but twice. He offers marketers a brutal lesson: sales can build scale, but only habit-building can sustain a brand.
In 2026, Peloton is functionally dead as a brand. Or at least, it’s a zombie. From a high of $167 in January 2021, it trades today at about $6. Once worth $47bn, it is now worth less than $3bn. It has died twice.
The First Death: Normality
The first death was violent and sudden. Peloton quietly went public in September 2019 at $29. Nobody cared until the pandemic hit. Gyms closed. Lockdowns began. And suddenly Peloton’s $2,000 stationary bike, with its connected screen, streaming classes and charismatic instructors, looked like the future of fitness.
Revenue exploded. In fiscal 2020, sales doubled to $1.8bn. The next year, they surged to $4bn. But if you had paused to look at the data, you could have seen the issue. In fiscal 2021, the composition of revenue told the real story: 78% from hardware sales, 22% from subscriptions. Peloton made its money selling bikes. The subscriptions were the cream.
Vaccines arrived. Gyms reopened. People remembered that they hated working out at home. More importantly, they remembered that they hated their Peloton. Owning a Peloton and using a Peloton are two entirely different things.
By fiscal 2022, hardware income had collapsed. In 2023, it fell another 22%. A year later, hardware sales were down to 33% of total revenue. Peloton was still selling bikes, but a large proportion of its target market now owned one.
Sales and Marketing, Razors and Blades
There are two sides to marketing success when you offer a stationary bike with a membership attached. The push, then the pull. The acquisition, then the activation. The unboxing, then the daily riding. And there is usually, eventually, more money in the pull than the push.
That’s the reason Gillette loses money on razors. Because it makes it on blades. Peloton did the opposite. It made money on the equivalent of the razors and then everyone, even the women, grew beards.
Peloton sold experience, community and transformation. But it did not deliver any of this in consumer terms. Home exercise is hard. It lacks the social pressure of a physical gym. It’s lonely. It stinks up your apartment. It’s not sticky.
Death Two: The Slow Bleed
Peloton will continue to bleed. It will die very slowly. It has more than $1.1bn in cash and cash equivalents. It won’t run out of money soon. But that’s a bad thing. The zombie thing. Every quarter will look like the last. Revenue flat or declining. Margins under pressure. The founder’s dream gone. The instructors making a fraction of what they used to. Spinning the fuck out of their bikes in empty rooms.
And something worse. It’s an early-2020s brand. Redolent of a particularly strange moment in human history. Like Atari was an 80s thing. Or Nokia was a 90s thing. Peloton was a huge brand for a very limited time and then quickly became associated with that time and left behind as a cultural artifact of that era.
You can have the best sales in the world. But without the pull, without real usage, real habit and real community, you’re just selling. Peloton understood the push. It didn’t understand the pull. And when the pandemic ended and people had a choice, they chose to leave. Because no amount of instructor charisma changes the fact that home exercise is lonely, hard and lacks the accountability of a gym. Peloton didn’t deliver what it promised. So it died. Twice.
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