OBÉ FITNESS

Mark Mullett and Ashley Mills were not fitness industry veterans. Mullett came from advertising and media.

Mills had a background in entertainment. They launched Obé in 2018 with a live streaming model before live streaming fitness was crowded — back when Peloton was still just a spin bike company and most fitness content was pre-recorded YouTube videos.

The founding insight was aesthetic and social: fitness class culture was boring to look at. Obé made it visually exciting.

Bright pink sets, high-energy instructors, live classes with real-time interaction. It felt closer to watching a fun TV show than slogging through a workout.

They launched with a $27 monthly subscription — accessible, but not free.

Obé operates a subscription fitness platform at $27 per month, offering live and on-demand classes across cardio, strength, yoga, pilates, barre, and more. The live class element is central to the product — thousands of members take the same class at the same time, creating a sense of community and accountability that on-demand content cannot replicate.

Instructors are contracted talent, often with social media followings of their own. The business makes money purely on subscription revenue — no hardware, no equipment, no physical studios.

The core product is the Obé app — available on iOS, Android, Apple TV, Roku, and web — offering live and on-demand fitness classes. Class categories include dance cardio, strength training, yoga, pilates, barre, prenatal fitness, and more.

Classes run 28-45 minutes, designed to fit into a busy schedule. The live class schedule creates a programming calendar that users can plan around, similar to a real gym class schedule but without leaving home.

The brand strategy was core to everything. Obé was visually distinct from the beginning — the bright pink, the high-energy branding, the instructor personalities.

This made it inherently social media-friendly at a time when Instagram was how fitness brands found audiences. Celebrity investment helped too: Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop invested, and the connection to wellness culture brought Obé to a demographic that overlap perfectly with its target subscriber.

The pandemic in 2020 should have been a massive growth catalyst — and it was initially — but the same lockdowns that drove people to digital fitness also made Peloton's hardware-plus-content model look dominant, pulling attention away from pure-play streaming platforms.

The hardest thing about being a live fitness streaming platform is that you are competing against free. YouTube has infinite workout videos.

Instagram has live workouts from celebrity trainers. Peloton has a $2 billion content machine and 3 million subscribers.

Obé's answer is community and brand — the feeling you get from taking a class with the same instructor on the same platform week after week. But that is a hard thing to defend, because switching costs are low and the product is fundamentally a recurring subscription that people can cancel any time their motivation dips.

Obé raised approximately $30 million across its funding rounds. Investors included Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop, Serena Williams (who has backed multiple fitness and wellness companies), and various venture capital firms focused on consumer health.

The celebrity investor roster gave Obé significant press coverage and social credibility in its early years — exactly the audience it was targeting. The company remained private and did not pursue an IPO.