The vogue in self-improvement this new year is for leaning out, that is, for giving yourself permission to relax on the understanding that some fugitive benefit will take hold to make you more competitive than those leaning in. I’m in favour of this for general reasons of lassitude, but it will be interesting to see how it plays out in the market. To wit: the team behind SoulCycle, once a phenomenally successful fitness franchise, now a dated brand with empty storefronts all over Manhattan, has launched a new business – notably, one in which no one has to do anything so basic as to sweat or hunch over a bike.
Or rather, any sweat triggered by Peoplehood, a company that invites strangers to attend 60-minute discussion groups called “gathers”, will be for reasons of embarrassment, not exercise. Does the notion of attending a group “workout for your relationships” amuse and appal you? Does the concept of “a gather”, with its strenuous avoidance of the gerund and vague whiff of Gilead, make you shake with laughter? Then you may want to learn more about Peoplehood (a hundred bucks says they toyed with the idea of capping the H and styling it PeopleHood), an enterprise which, on the earliest evidence, promises to offer a lot more value in this vein.
Given the track record of Elizabeth Cutler and Julie Rice, the two women who created SoulCycle in 2006 (a third founder, Ruth Zukerman, left in 2009), Peoplehood will probably turn out to be phenomenally successful. At its height, SoulCycle had almost 100 locations, mainly in New York and LA, and was valued at $900m. In 2011, Cutler and Rice sold a majority stake to Equinox, the gym chain, and when the pair exited the company in 2016, they each picked up a cool $90m. Their insight that women, in particular, go to the gym for emotional as well as physical reasons was translated brilliantly into the SoulCycle experience: intense exercise undertaken while a group leader shouts empowerment slogans at you. If nobody wants to slog on a bike these days – except, perhaps, Rishi Sunak, recently spotted at a Taylor Swift-themed SoulCycle session in LA – there remains a demand for the other stuff.
It’s conceivable that sharing intimacies with strangers might trigger an endorphin rush, albeit on a smaller scale than at a spin class. What is fascinating about Peoplehood, given the company’s branding, is that the group leaders, or “superconnectors”, as they’re styled, don’t have any stated background in therapy or its attendant disciplines. There are no bios on the website, so who can say where “Connor” or “Juliana” – both running sessions this week in New York – come from. But in a beta test attended last year by a reporter from the New York Times, the superconnector was described as an “actress, dancer and model”. My hunch is that the old pool of spin instructors may prove useful in this new model.
On the face of things, that might not be a terrible calculation. Back in the day, the top SoulCycle teachers garnered huge followings and genuinely seemed to inspire many women. The difficulty, I suppose, is that while a fitness guru on stage can simply read from a script, things become more difficult when the customers talk back. Peoplehood falls more generally within a trend of empowerment networks that promise, via vague means, to advance us – see also Chief, the trouble-beset US women’s empowerment network (joining fee: up to $7,900) that comes with the tagline “powerful women coming together to become better leaders together”, and last year delivered a spectacular and public falling out among members.
Anyway, Peoplehood is starting small. By New York standards, its pricing structure is modest: the five-session new year challenge costs $120 (virtual) or $165 for in person. “We laugh, we learn, we get to know ourselves better. Most of all we support each other as we continue to grow”, runs copy on the website that may or may not have been generated by humans. Meanwhile, you can pick up a Peoplehood tote bag for $65 or a PPLHD sweatshirt for $140 – the real point of the exercise, perhaps. Maybe, just maybe, there is laughter, learning and growth to be found with fellow travellers at a Peoplehood session. But there is one very real benefit in choosing to abstain: the tribalism and community these kinds of ventures inspire in those who violently and instinctively recoil from them.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
