Elizabeth Cutler & Julie Rice

Julie Rice was a talent manager in Los Angeles. Elizabeth Cutler had a degree in art history and religious studies, had spent time in a monastery in India, and had worked as a real estate agent in Telluride before moving to New York.

Neither had worked a day in the fitness industry.

Both were unhappy in the way that does not show up on a résumé. Cutler, by her own account, had gained a great deal of weight during pregnancy and had been introduced to indoor cycling by a friend. Rice had left Los Angeles for New York in 2002 and missed the social texture of West Coast fitness culture — the idea that a workout could be where you saw people. Both were new mothers with infants at home.

This is a different starting position from most origin stories, and it deserves its own name. They were not fleeing a job they hated toward an idea that had seized them. They were two competent people in their thirties who wanted to build something and had not yet decided what.

The first studio was a former dance studio in a rear lobby on West 72nd Street on the Upper West Side. They found it on Craigslist. After signing the lease they discovered the zoning did not permit exterior signage, meaning the business would open with no way for a passer-by to know it existed.

There was no venture capital. Funding was personal — Cutler had money from an early investment in the beverage company Izze — and no source gives a verified figure for how much went in. That absence is worth stating plainly rather than filling with an estimate.

Every constraint pushed them toward the same answer: if nobody can find you from the street, the product has to be something people tell each other about.

So the studio was built as an experience rather than a gym. Candlelight instead of fluorescent lighting, with the instructor's bike on a raised platform — an arrangement writers have compared to pews around an altar. No mirrors. No leaderboards, no visible performance metrics, no numbers to compare yourself against anyone else, which was the opposite of where the industry was heading and the exact opposite of what Flywheel would later build its brand on.

The pricing was the other structural bet. In 2006, spinning came bundled inside a gym membership. They sold classes individually at roughly $27 to $30, which by the mid-2010s had risen to about $34 in New York. Charging per class meant every ride had to justify itself, and it meant the economics rewarded intensity of attachment rather than the health-club model of selling memberships to people who never come.

They hired for performance, not fitness credentials. By their own account they auditioned roughly 120 candidates for every 25 hired and put them through weeks of full-time training. Growth came from flyering apartment mailrooms and from riders bringing friends. A long hallway that served as the locker room turned into a social space, which they have described as accidental and formative.

It worked to a degree that is hard to overstate.

By the time SoulCycle filed to go public in July 2015, it ran 38 studios, had done $112 million in revenue in 2014, and — unusually for a company filing an S-1 — was solidly profitable, with $26.5 million in net income. Average revenue per studio was about $4 million. Press coverage put the valuation as high as $1.25 billion. Equinox had taken a majority stake in 2011 and acquired the company outright in 2016; Cutler stepped down as co-CEO in 2015, and both founders had exited by 2016, each reportedly receiving around $90 million.

The filing also showed the weakness: New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco generated between 95% and 97% of revenue. The company wanted 250 domestic studios. It was, in practice, a three-city business.

The IPO never happened. It was paused, then formally withdrawn in May 2018, with the company citing market conditions.

What followed was not one crisis but three, and none of them involved the founders, who were already gone.

In August 2019, Stephen Ross — chairman of Equinox's parent — planned a high-dollar fundraiser for Donald Trump's re-election campaign. The boycott was immediate and celebrity-led. Card-transaction data analysed by Fast Company showed SoulCycle purchases falling 12.8% that month. Chief executive Melanie Whelan resigned that November.

In March 2020, COVID closed all 99 studios.

In November 2020, Business Insider published an investigation drawing on more than thirty current and former riders and staff, alleging that several top instructors had engaged in conduct including racist and homophobic remarks, fat-shaming, sexual relationships with riders, and sending explicit photographs, and that this had been tolerated because those instructors generated revenue. These are allegations reported by journalists, not findings adjudicated anywhere, and they should be read as such.

The company closed 19 of 83 North American studios in August 2022. It runs roughly 57 US locations today, against a peak of 99.

The founding half of this story is close to a clean lesson, and it is one the Ledger's other entries rarely show: they picked the partner before they picked the business.

Most advice treats the idea as primary and the team as an implementation detail. Cutler and Rice inverted it. The lunch produced a working relationship and a division of labour within hours, and the category followed. If you are competent and unhappy and have no idea, that is a legitimate route, and this is what it looks like executed well.

The product lessons hold up independently. They turned their worst constraint — a space nobody could see from the street — into a strategy of building something worth describing to a friend. They removed the mirrors and the metrics when the industry was adding them. They charged per class when everyone else bundled, which forced every single session to be good.

The rest is a caution about what you own and what you are buying into. Zukerman's account of losing her stake because she never legally protected it is the cheapest lesson in this entire library and the one most often learned too late. And the brand the founders built as a community turned out to be exquisitely exposed to who owned it: a fundraiser hosted by the parent company's chairman, years after both founders had left, measurably moved customer behaviour within weeks. Intense loyalty is not a one-way asset. The same attachment that fills a candlelit room at 6am is what makes people feel personally implicated by what the owner does.