🚴 Peloton told you the bike was a gift. The stock knew better.

Ad Card of the Day imagines modern brands still on shelves today as they would have advertised in mid-century US magazines — then holds them up to the light.

In January 1961, a woman in a circle skirt and pearls would have found this advertisement perfectly sensible. Exercise was a domestic duty. The husband was the authority on what she needed. And if a gleaming piece of fitness machinery arrived at Christmas with his name on the card — well, that was love, wasn't it?

Peloton launched in 2012 with a different vocabulary but essentially the same architecture. The bike was aspirational. The subscription model was clever. The 2019 Christmas ad, though, was something else.

A husband gifts his wife a Peloton for Christmas. She spends the next year filming herself exercising and reporting her progress back to him. The ad played it straight. The internet did not. 1 Within days of the backlash going viral, Peloton's stock dropped roughly $1.5 billion in market capitalization — a real-time verdict on a 30-second spot. 2

The company recovered. Then came 2021.

In March of that year, the Consumer Product Safety Commission issued a public warning about Peloton's Tread+ treadmill after a child was pulled underneath the machine and died. 3 CEO John Foley's initial response was to publicly dispute the CPSC's characterization and resist any recall. He eventually reversed course. Peloton recalled 125,000 Tread+ units and, in 2023, agreed to pay a $19 million civil penalty — the largest ever assessed by the CPSC against a consumer product company at that point.

The financial reckoning had a certain symmetry to it. The pandemic had turned Peloton into a phenomenon: factories ran triple shifts, production couldn't keep pace, and the stock hit $171 in January 2021. Then vaccine rollouts emptied the home gyms. In fiscal year 2022, Peloton posted a net loss of approximately $1.2 billion. 4 More than 4,000 employees were laid off across 2022 and 2023. John Foley resigned as CEO in February 2022.

The subscriber base, which had crested above 3 million, began to decline. In 2024, a securities class-action settlement reached $495 million — resolving claims that Peloton had misled investors about demand and safety during the pandemic surge. 5

The Relaxacisor was an electro-passive exercise belt that ran a mild current through the user's body while they reclined on a chaise. No movement required. The FDA banned it in 1970 after it was linked to miscarriages, aggravated hernias, and epileptic episodes. Its advertising had made no mention of any of this. The vibrating belt machines of the 1950s and 1960s — the Vibro-Slim, the Royal Vibrator, a dozen variants sold through department stores and mail-order catalogs — promised to shake weight from hips and thighs with zero effort. The FTC pursued their advertisers through the decade for false weight-loss claims.

The pattern isn't hard to read. Fitness equipment enters the home promising transformation with minimal downside. The safety data lags the marketing. The regulators follow. Peloton is a newer iteration of something quite old.

The ad from 1961 would have fit in just fine.

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