SoulCycle Looks to Sell Its Soul
nd second, SoulCycle has made money. A lot of money. This tends to happen when you charge people more than $30 for a single spin class, and still manage to sell out 60-person sessions.
The spiritual and the financial can coexist, of course, and SoulCycle will be testing its model even more in the coming months. Highly profitable and growing fast, the company recently began proceedings for an initial public offering. In doing so, SoulCycle is gambling that people outside of New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles (which, together, account for 95% of SoulCycle’s revenue) will be willing to drop $30+ in order to pedal in unison with strangers, listening to messages of empowerment, growth, and self-actualization.
But SoulCycle is also part of a larger gamble: namely, that Americans will be willing to meld the forms of spirituality and the forms of capitalism in more and more blatant ways. In this, SoulCycle has a lot in common with prosperity gospel preachers, ethical consumption marketers, and other moneymakers testing the frontiers of luxury and soulfulness.