peloton Rowing Machine, one of the company The worst kept secrets of the last two years.coming soon.
Not too soon: It will ship sometime in December, and the company isn’t sharing any more details beyond that. However, as of today, Peloton Row is officially available for pre-order. It’s the latest hardware announcement from the connected fitness company, whose fate has been in doubt since a new CEO took over earlier this year and began enacting streamlining and cost-cutting measures.
The Peloton Row joins a product line that includes expensive, Internet-connected bikes Y treadmills with integrated touch screens; a decoder with a camera that tracks your body’s movements during strength training; and an app experience that Peloton charges between $13 and $44 per month for, depending on the device he’s using it on. Since the company’s inception, Peloton has always commanded a premium. But even with that context, the price of Peloton Row is staggering: $3,195. And that’s just for the rower itself, which doesn’t include the $44 monthly charge to stream Peloton videos.
“We are appraising it for what it is. It’s really a premium experience and it’s priced like a premium experience,” says Tom Cortese, co-founder of Peloton and the company’s chief product officer. “I mean, this is a conversation that we’ve had a lot over 10 years. When we hit the market with the Peloton bike, I used to hear, ‘I could buy a bike for $250 on Amazon.’ Great, go buy a bike for $250 on Amazon. We believe the value of Peloton Row is unparalleled in the marketplace.”
The market for modern rowers Cortese is referring to includes Hydrow rowers, which start at $1,495 for the Hydrow Wave and run around $2,500 for a higher-end model, as well as the Echelon Row-S (which starts at $1,599) and the NordicTrack RW900. ($1,799). All of these have screens attached to the rower, though content experiences vary. The OG of indoor rowers, the Concept2, has no screen but is only $990.
Peloton is betting that building Row, and more importantly its content, will help sell it to a wide variety of buyers, whether they’re advanced rowers, college athletes, or just people curious about rowing as a full-body workout. Cortese adds that price “is largely dictated by what it costs us to do, our decisions to invest in the hardware, to include the premium display with a soundbar and larger display surface, to add a twist to the display, design a comfortable seat, to include an electromagnetic motor.” Peloton isn’t selling Row at cost; there will be some margin in the hardware, says Cortese. But Peloton’s primary focus right now, as new CEO Barry McCarthy has laid out, is to get more people hooked at different levels of Peloton subscriptions.
A super expensive rowing machine is an odd way to go, but this product has been in the works for about two years, meaning it was developed during an earlier era of Peloton. During a recent Zoom briefing (no one at WIRED has seen the rower in person), the Peloton Row seemed to have all the sleek lines and rugged metal of its Peloton siblings.
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