n March 13, as New York prepared to move indoors to slow the spread of the coronavirus, Mirror founder Brynn Putnam closed the offices of her high-tech fitness startup and sent her nearly 100 employees home. The former ballerina now hunkers down in her Greenwich Village apartment with her husband, Lowell, also an entrepreneur. The couple alternates who gets to be on Zoom from the bedroom and who watches their 3-year-old son, George, in the living room.
Brick-and-mortar gyms and fitness studios are an almost $100 billion business, according to the International Health Racquet and Sportsclub Association. When Putnam launched the product in September 2018, five years after Peloton first started connecting bikes, she was betting on a gradual, continuing shift toward home fitness.
At age 7, she joined the School of American Ballet, cofounded by George Balanchine. Her debut with the New York City Ballet was noted in theThe Nutcracker.Some dancers only dance; others have additional interests. Putnam was in the latter category. “My dad said to me, ‘It would be great if you could learn some actual skills,’ ” she recalls. She studied Russian literature and culture at Harvard.
Clients raved about Refine, and Putnam expanded the studio into a mini-chain. By 2016, though, newly pregnant and suffering from severe morning sickness, working out in a club no longer appealed to her. Peloton was booming, but Putnam didn’t want a bike in her apartment. Nor did she like the content and interactivity of the streaming apps she tried. Hermoment came when she upgraded Refine, adding more mirrors, and got rave reviews from her clientele.
She ultimately closed her seed funding with Lerer Hippeau from the hospital on November 15, 2016, the day her son was born. “Don’t mess with Brynn,” says Lerer, who agreed to invest after seeing her janky prototype. “She is extraordinary at getting people to believe in her vision and follow her.” After two years of design work, Putnam launched the product, now made in Mexico, in September 2018. Though that was six months later than she hoped, it went off without any major flaws, a big win for a complex piece of electronic equipment.
For Joe Popson, a 32-year-old IT support manager in New York, that’s been the case. Although he previously struggled to go to the gym, since he bought a Mirror last May he’s been working out five times a week, generally starting his day with 15 minutes of dance cardio, and has lost 20 pounds. With Mirror, he says, he loves that he can see both the instructor and himself as he works out, and that afterward he can interact with the instructor on Instagram.
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