SoulCycle — At-Home Bike
Category
Digital, Product, Strategy, UX, Video, WebAbout This Project
The Setup
SoulCycle was built on a room: sixty people in the dark, riding to the beat, with an instructor up front and music you could feel in your chest. That room made the brand, and it also limited it. The experience only existed inside the studio.
At the same time, fitness was becoming media. Peloton had shown that people would pay for a bike, a screen and a subscription, and that a great instructor could reach millions of riders instead of sixty. Equinox Group saw the same opening and formed Equinox Media, one platform behind an app and a connected bike that carried SoulCycle, Equinox, Precision Run, Pure Yoga and more. Its leadership called it the “HBO of fitness.”
SoulCycle had two ways into the home. SoulCycle Radio on SiriusXM brought the music and the instructors’ voices into cars and kitchens. The at-home bike was the bigger bet. It had to feel like SoulCycle rather than a spin bike with a logo, and it had to compete with every other screen in the house for a rider’s attention.
What I Led
This started as a pitch. At Cainkade, my team won the concept work against R/GA and Work & Co. SoulCycle then acquired Cainkade and brought my team in-house to build what we had pitched. I went on to become Head of Product Design and Creative Director, owning both the product and the web creative.
I led the digital riding experience across the bike and the Equinox+ app. Five principles guided the work:
- Create an emotional connection.
- Let the technology disappear.
- Ride to the beat.
- Keep the pack together.
- Earn every pixel on the screen.
Every decision came back to one question: does this feel like the studio?
That led to some deliberate calls:
- No public leaderboard. SoulCycle riders measure themselves against their own last ride, not against strangers.
- Music ahead of metrics.
- Built for the saddle. Every screen was designed for a rider who is an arm’s length away, sweating, in the middle of a climb.
- Instructors as headliners. Riders follow people, not workouts, so each instructor got a profile that works like an artist page.
When the studios closed, the bike stopped being a second product and became the only way to ride with SoulCycle.
What We Delivered
- A bike that knows you. For You opens on one recommended class, sized for the room, with a playlist preview and the friends who have already ridden it.
- The whole class before you clip in. Class detail slides over the library as a panel. It rates paces, climbs, choreography and weights, and lists every track on the playlist.
- Instructors with a front door. Each instructor’s profile brings together their bio, riding style, on-demand classes, live Studio Streams and in-studio schedule, and suggests other instructors to follow.
- A ride that gets out of the way. In class, the screen shows three numbers: cadence, resistance and output. A beat ring pulses with the track and fills when your legs lock onto the music. One swipe clears everything but the instructor and the music.
- Celebration, studio style. Post-ride leads with a sentence, not a stat, and makes beat match the headline number. Milestones like Clip-In Champion at 500 rides take over the screen. Total miles turn into a route between two SoulCycle studios, and riders who stayed with us at home got a thank-you written in our own voice.
- Free Ride and entertainment mode. Riders were going to watch Netflix anyway, so Free Ride let them do it on our bike. Netflix, Prime Video and Disney+ play full screen with the metrics on one quiet rail, and every mile still counts toward streaks and milestones.
- Equinox+ in your pocket. The app carried the same thinking to the phone: a personal For You feed, every Equinox brand in one place, the live studio schedule, and instructors as the way in.
- One design language for the saddle. Bold type, a black, white and yellow palette with yellow saved for the next action, tap targets sized for distance, and the SoulCycle wheel used as the loader and the milestone frame.
The bike won GQ’s Fitness Award for Best At-Home Bike, with GQ’s editors writing that it “transports you right into [the studio].” It was also a Marie Claire Power Pick in back-to-back years. Universal Music Group licensed its entire catalog to Equinox Media, giving the platform the world’s largest music library, and Equinox+ went on to build artist-themed rides around album drops and anniversaries.
SoulCycle came out of it as more than a room. It was a media brand that could reach riders on a bike, a phone, a TV and the radio.
