MIRROR

Brynn Putnam was a former professional ballet dancer who had founded Refine Method, a successful boutique fitness studio in New York. She noticed that her best clients wanted the boutique fitness experience but could not always get to a physical studio.

In 2016 she started building Mirror — a sleek, full-length mirror that doubled as a display screen streaming live and on-demand fitness classes. When you turned it off, it looked like a regular mirror.

When it was on, a trainer appeared inside it. The pitch was elegant: an expensive fitness device that disappeared into your home decor when not in use.

She raised $72 million from investors including Lux Capital and Spark Capital before the pandemic. Then COVID hit in March 2020 and the at-home fitness market went vertical.

Lululemon swooped in and acquired Mirror for $500 million in June 2020 before it had even IPO'd.

Mirror sold the hardware — a $1,495 full-length mirror — upfront and then charged a $39 monthly subscription for live and on-demand classes. The subscription covered unlimited classes across all Mirror devices in a household.

The model was hardware-as-a-distribution-vehicle: the physical product was the expensive Trojan horse that locked customers into a recurring content subscription. Lululemon saw the subscription as an extension of its fitness lifestyle brand and an ongoing customer relationship beyond the transactional apparel purchase.

Mirror Interactive Home Gym (full-length mirror display, $1,495). Live and on-demand class subscription ($39/month).

Classes covered strength, cardio, yoga, boxing, barre, pilates, and meditation. The platform eventually offered personal training sessions via the Mirror screen.

Lululemon rebranded the service as Lululemon Studio in 2022 before ultimately winding down the hardware.

Mirror grew on the strength of boutique fitness aesthetics and influencer marketing in its early years. The product sold well in affluent urban markets where the target customer was already spending $300 per month on SoulCycle and Equinox memberships.

COVID eliminated the physical fitness option overnight and drove a wave of pandemic buying. Lululemon accelerated growth post-acquisition by cross-selling Mirror hardware to its existing apparel customer base and placing Mirror in Lululemon retail stores.

The cross-sell thesis was the foundation of the entire acquisition logic.

The pandemic tailwind became a headwind. When gyms reopened in 2021 and 2022, consumers cancelled their at-home fitness subscriptions and returned to physical studios.

Peloton collapsed. Beachbody struggled.

Mirror followed. Lululemon found that the cross-sell thesis was not working — apparel customers were not converting to $1,500 hardware purchases at the rates Lululemon had projected.

The subscription retention was weaker than expected once the pandemic-era lock-in ended. By 2023, Lululemon had spent $500 million acquiring Mirror, sunk additional hundreds of millions into the business, and was staring at a hardware platform that was losing ground to competition from Apple, Peloton, and studio reopenings simultaneously.

Lux Capital, Spark Capital, Point72 Ventures, Fuel Capital, Slow Ventures. Acquired by Lululemon for $500 million in June 2020.