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
The Broadsheet is Fortune’s newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women. Today’s edition was curated by Kinsey Crowley. Subscribe here.
ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
- 3-day weekend forever. A U.K. trial of the four-day workweek left companies wanting more. A vast majority of companies in the study are sticking with the arrangement after finding revenue increased while worker burnout decreased. Men involved in the study reported spending more time looking after their children, a two-times greater increase than women in the study. Bloomberg
- Fake nurses. 7,600 fake nursing school diplomas were awarded in South Florida, enabling 2,800 untrained people to pass the national nursing board exams and obtain licenses. Phony degree mills could make $7 billion in yearly sales worldwide, and the rise of ChatGPT could make the process of getting fraudulent credentials even easier. Forbes
- C-suite gigs. The pandemic started a lasting trend of 'fractional executive' jobs, or part-time freelance positions in some top company positions. Roles that require expertise in the industry without day-to-day final decision-making like CMO or CFO have increasingly attracted experienced professionals who are looking for more flexibility in their life. Wall Street Journal
- Making a run for it. California Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee has announced that she will run to fill Dianne Feinstein's seat in the Senate—a race that Democratic Reps. Katie Porter and Adam Schiff have already entered. Her announcement video highlights the lack of Black women in the chamber since Kamala Harris became vice president, and her allies expect her to position herself as a scrappy underdog in her campaign. Washington Post
MOVERS AND SHAKERS: Goldman Sachs' Dina Powell McCormick has taken over as board chair for the New York nonprofit Robin Hood; Policylink's Angela Glover Blackwell joined the organization's board. Asana has appointed Neeracha Taychakhoonavudh as global head of customer experience and Shannon Sullivan Duffy as CMO. Recommerce company Trove hired Natalya Davick as CFO and Julia Cai as chief technology officer.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
- Primetime. Former press secretary for President Biden Jen Psaki is getting her own talk show. MSNBC will air Inside With Jen Psaki Sundays at noon, with hopes that her fanbase will help buoy sinking ratings and viewership numbers. New York Times
- Guilty moms. South Korea faces the world's lowest fertility rate, the lowest trust rates between citizens among OECD nations, and female-labor participation is below 60%, which falls behind most advanced economies. Apps like Momsitter aim to remedy gender equality which contributes to these problems by connecting high-earning families with babysitters and alleviating the guilt felt by working mothers. Bloomberg
- Double down. Kate Forbes is angling to replace Nicola Sturgeon as the leader of the Scottish National Party, following her resignation announcement last week. However, Forbes opposes same-sex marriage, a view she has doubled down on despite opposition from her own party. This comes at a time when the U.K. government stepped in to block the progressive Scottish gender recognition reform bill, a move that Forbes's leading opponent has vowed to challenge. Guardian
- Wisconsin Supreme Court. Janet Protasiewicz won a four-way primary for Wisconsin's Supreme Court and will face conservative Dan Kelly in April's election. If she wins, the court will lean liberally for the first time in 15 years and the justices could overturn a pre-Civil War abortion ban. Wisconsin Public Radio
ON MY RADAR
A novel that confronts our true-crime obsession The New Yorker
The Iron Dames—the only all-female team in endurance racing history—take Daytona Vogue
Biracial women say Meghan is proof racism and privilege coexist Washington Post
The simple reason why egg-freezing is all over your Instagram Bustle
PARTING WORDS
"It is for others to know if I can do it, you can do it. I sometimes look at people, and I'm like, 'Oh, my God. You have no idea the possibilities of your own life.'"
—Sheryl Lee Ralph on finding success later in life
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