Smoke and mirrors.  That pretty much sums up the impressive sales numbers that Peloton put up during the pandemic, and the CEO apparently knows it.  

John Foley called a virtual all-hands meeting on Wednesday for the entire company Wednesday to deal with the fact the company’s stock price has tanked.  It appears to have caught most of the company off guard, which is surprising, because you’d think a public company would have someone on the payroll who may have noticed that sales spiked in 2020 because, oh, I don’t know, because people couldn’t leave their homes?

Foley said his company’s rush to hire more employees and grow their manufacturing and logistics at an unrealistic pace has made Peloton  “a little undisciplined.” 

Insider got access to a leaked recording of the meeting. Here’s more from the CEO. 

“Every decision we were in for probably 18 months, every meeting we were in, we said, it doesn’t matter. Just get the capacity we had to go from here to here, you know, a six-, seven-, eight-, ten-X increase in capacity across a lot of our manufacturing and supply-chain channels. And it was incredible. And it was an incredible job.”

Yeah, the problem is it wasn’t sustainable. $2K or more is a lot to pay for a treadmill with obnoxious virtual instructors pumping you up with cheesy fax motivation.  It’s sometimes more fun, and feasible to go to the local health club you pay a $45 monthly membership due for.  Working out in your bedroom or den does tend to get old after a while.  Which caught Peloton completely off guard. 

Foley told his employees in the meeting it’s time to go “back to basics,” in an attempt to impress Wall Street and get the stock price back up. Which would certainly help the CEO if that happened, because he officially fell out of the exclusive billionaire’s club when the stock fell 40% since their earnings call last week. 

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