Good morning, Broadsheet readers! U.K. companies favor the four-day work week, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) has entered California's Senate race, and SoulCycle's founders launch a new startup with some lessons from their first.
- Community class. Julie Rice and Elizabeth Cutler founded SoulCycle together 17 years ago. They helped create the category of boutique fitness. And they discovered that people showed up to the cycling studio's classes—famous for their dimly lit rooms and inspirational speeches—not just to work out, but to connect.
"What they were finding in those rooms was connection with themselves and with each other," Rice says.
After working on separate projects, the former co-CEOs reunited, determined to recapture the sense of community that SoulCycle had developed almost by accident. Rice and Cutler today launched Peoplehood, a startup that aims to create another new wellness category focused on relationships. The founders began to work on the initial concept for Peoplehood in late 2019 and raised a round of funding led by venture capital firm Maveron last year. (They declined to disclose the size of the round.)
The Peoplehood platform offers up a lot of new jargon to define its version of "relational wellness." Members show up for a 60-minute guided group conversation, which Peoplehood calls a "Gather" led by a "super connector" guide. Participants can opt to come on their own to work on themselves ("peoplehood") or specific relationships with a partner ("couplehood"). Monthly memberships, both digital and in-person in New York, start at $95. "It's a workout for your relationships," Cutler says.
For the wellness-obsessed, adding one more hour-long session to their schedule might be an easy sell. The founders are hoping to convince more skeptical consumers by anchoring the concept of "relational health" in more familiar experiences. The programs feature some of the same language and tools as group or couples therapy, but the founders say their offerings are not intended to replace professional treatment. Rather, they cite broad societal trends—the decline of traditional third places and organized religion, the rise of loneliness—to explain the need for their community-based offering.
Rice and Cutler left SoulCycle in 2016, and the business has struggled in the years since. Now owned by Equinox, the cycling chain dealt with allegations of harassment, racism, and bullying; the rise of competitor Peloton; the troubled rollout of its own at-home bike; and the pandemic. SoulCycle shuttered 25% of its locations last summer.
After exiting SoulCycle, Rice served as chief brand officer and a partner at WeWork between 2017 and 2019, during the Adam Neumann era, when the company talked a big talk about community building. The experience "was really a validation of how much people love community," Rice says. "There are a lot of things that went right and wrong with that business, but the community that was in those buildings loved being there, they were thriving, they were finding inspiration from each other."
Ultimately, Rice and Cutler hope their expertise in building community translates to a business where personal connections are not a side benefit, but the entire purpose. "At the end of our long journey at SoulCycle, we understood that it didn't matter what we were selling, as long as people felt like they were part of something," Rice says.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe
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