Lululemon to buy at-home fitness startup Mirror for $500 million
In a statement, Lululemon CEO Calvin McDonald said the company looks forward to working with Mirror to “accelerate the growth of personalized in-home fitness.”
While taking classes like cardio workouts, yoga and boxing, customers can see key metrics like their heartbeats-per-minute (or BPM) and calories burned. The device, which is controlled by an app on your phone, comes with fitness bands, a stand and a Bluetooth heart-rate monitor.
In a conversation shortly before at-home fitness company Peloton went public last fall, Mirror founder and CEO Brynn Putnam told CNN Business her company is taking a “different approach than the competition.”
Putnam explained that she’s building a product that can flex as trends change. Mirror wants to be “the third screen in your life,” she said at the time. In other words, it’s more about the ability to connect with consumers in their homes with ease than it is about the particular application.
Putnam, a former dancer for the New York City Ballet, in 2010 opened a boutique fitness studio inside of a church in Manhattan. Called Refine Method, the studio’s workouts focused on full-body, high-intensity interval training. It was space that Putnam could afford, but she had to install custom-built equipment that could be removed weekly for Sunday morning services and rebuilt again shortly after.
Putnam came up with the idea for Mirror after she struggled to fit workout classes into her schedule as a pregnant entrepreneur. Simultaneously, she noticed how much customers at Refine Method loved working out alongside mirrors. She sought to blend the two concepts.
Putnam told CNN Business last fall that the startup expected to expand into other aspects of life, including health, fashion and beauty. “Fitness is just one of the many content experiences in the home,” she said at the time.
Lululemon said Mirror will operate as a standalone firm, with Putnam as CEO and reporting into McDonald once the transaction is complete.