SoulCycle had a cult following. Then, one decision changed everything

I used to schlep from my office to a 6:30 p.m. Soul Survivor class, shower, and make dinner by 8 p.m. Every week. The waiting lists were insane. The bike you got mattered. Thirty-four dollars for a cycling class and nobody blinked. That wasn’t about fitness. SoulCycle was always about selling a version of yourself back to you, one you could embody if you worked hard enough. The brand said as much itself. Its tagline was never about the workout: “Take your journey. Change your body. Find your soul.” That’s a self-transformation pitch with a bike attached to it. When SoulCycle finally launched its first real ad campaign in 2017, the CEO made the strategy explicit. As Melanie Whelan told Marketing Daily, the “Find It” campaign was meant to help riders “discover something, the thing that makes it meaningful to them”—whether that was strength, purpose, or clarity. The class was just where it happened. Julie Rice, who cofounded the company, put it more bluntly years later: “People didn’t come to SoulCycle because they got fit. It was the connection they got in the room.” A researcher at Harvard Divinity School who studied the brand found something stranger still—people were bringing que…