Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…I think a lot of these could have been avoided with some different product decisions and some different pricing decisions. There is a trend that they need to follow over the entire lifetime of their business, which is dropping the price point so they can keep attracting that next concentric circle out from the core affluent customer. If they're actually interested in continuing to grow the business, they need to do that. But even though that's true over a long period of time, this probably wasn't the right time in history to do that. Given what happened with the pandemic and with demand, and let's not talk about supply chain, inventory, and stuff yet because I think that made their business really not resilient—all the things that they did there—but they probably should have (easy to say in hindsight) not shipped the Bike+ and not dropped prices yet, even though they know they need to do both of those things in the longer term. Yeah. The Bike+ was a product that needed more work before shipping. Then in terms of cannibalization of their existing customer base, I think they really hurt themselves a lot on some of the aspirational aspects of the Peloton brand around this. Also, simple things like the bikes that the instructors use in the classes are the original bikes. If they really want to push the bike, why don't they use the pluses?…

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