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 was violent and sudden.
The second was slower, more instructive.
Peloton quietly went public in September 2019 at $29. Nobody cared until the pandemic hit. Gyms closed. Lockdowns began. People got fat eating biscuits under their masks. 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. Investors who bought at the IPO had turned $10,000 into $57,000. And of course, everyone extrapolated the shit out of this. They stretched the unreasonable, unrepresentative days of COVID past any parabola of sense into nonsense.
The company was going to change the world.
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. The high-margin recurring revenue that justified the stratospheric valuation. It was a beautiful opening scene, but the rest of the movie was yet to play out. And if it was to match the strong opening moments, it would have to deliver the back end.
The first death: normality
Vaccines arrived. Gyms reopened. People remembered that they hated working out at home. They even remembered they could go out again on a real bike. More importantly, they remembered that they hated their Peloton. Because owning a Peloton and using a Peloton are two entirely different things.
The push, the sale, the acquisition, the marketing excitement of owning a connected fitness device, unboxing it and doing that first big workout, all worked beautifully during COVID.
Phew!
Workout, then bake sourdough. Life-changing! Peloton had crushed the push. But the pull, the habit, the community, usage and advocacy, was a different thing.
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. The rest of the movie now had to play out. If you wanted to make money selling more bikes, the existing installed base was a problem. But if Peloton was really going to make it, become a proper company, that base was the start of subscription, usage and long-term profit. It was everything.
But it did not happen. Once people bought their bikes, the relationship usually ended. At the peak of the pandemic, Peloton had 3m connected subscribers paying $39 monthly. Extraordinary numbers. If they had been sustainable.
In Q4 fiscal 2022 alone, the moment gyms reopened, the company lost 143,000 members in a single quarter. App numbers were worse. By 2024, the paid app churn rate exceeded 8% monthly. Most lasted less than a year. CEO Barry McCarthy acknowledged the obvious: “We were less successful at engaging and retaining users than we expected.”
Translation: we sold bikes but didn’t build a business.
The company reported a staggering $2.8bn net loss in fiscal 2022. Let that sink in. Two years earlier, it had been a $4bn revenue company. Now it was losing money faster than it made it. The stock collapsed 76% in 2021 alone.
Peloton didn’t go bankrupt. It cut back ruthlessly enough to avert immediate disaster. Thousands of layoffs. Closed studios. Eliminated product lines. Operating expenses that were $2.2bn in 2022 were slashed to $862m in the first nine months of fiscal 2026. It was an operational success story. By Q3 fiscal 2026, the company had delivered net income of $26m for the quarter, and $1.6m for the first nine months of the fiscal year. Not because demand was returning. Because it had stopped spending.
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, at least not in the metaphorical way that makes companies money.
Equipment sales were 78% of revenue in 2021. Today they’re 33%. It could no longer sell hardware. Everyone who wanted one had already bought one, and most didn’t use it. Peloton’s entire valuation was built on the assumption that hardware sales would sustain. It never questioned whether the subscription base would maintain because it never looked at actual usage as the true engine of the company’s success. It looked at ownership. At sales.
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. The brand still exists like a dusty bike in the corner. Embarrassing its owner. At best, a clothes rack.
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. When you had a Zoom call with someone who had a Peloton in the corner of their apartment in 2021, you said, “Cool, Peloton.” And told your wife over dinner. If you spy one today in someone’s place five years later, you say, “Peloton?” Really?
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.
