Their flash NSW Martin Place store is now ‘Permanently’ closed and their David Jones retail experiment flopped now the US Peloton group is slashing marketing and advertising costs as demand for their high tech peddle machines struggles to attract consumers.

The former CEO of Spotify in Australia Karen Lawson who launched Peloton in Australia has also gone with the Company now only operating a retail outlet in Westfield Chermside in Brisbane.

This week the Company moved to slash its advertising and marketing costs for a fourth consecutive quarter.

Each quarter as sales fall further the US business that has a shocking quality record having been deemed responsible for the death of a child on one of their treadmills in the USA, has come up with spin messaging in an effort to deflect the issues the Company faces.

Premium Martin Place Peloton Store Permently Shut Down

“What we’ve been doing basically is taking a real holistic look at every aspect of marketing,” said CEO and President Peter Stern on a recent earnings call.

In the quarter ended March 31, Peloton’s marketing and advertising spending was slashed with overall sales and marketing spending falling considerably.

Peloton reported a net loss of A$74.69 million, an improvement on the A$253 million net loss reported in the quarter a year prior.

Revenue declined 13% with the head of marketing Lauren Weinberg stepping down as Peloton’s chief marketing officer two weeks ago, after just 16 months.

The new marketing boss will the third marketer to take on the CMO job since 2020, a year that was the start of a wild ride for the brand.

Covid lockdowns initially gave Peloton sales an enormous boost, leading executives to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to in-house U.S. production capacity in the belief that demand would continue at that level for years.

But as the pandemic waned, sales plunged, with consumers returning to gyms and their other pre-Covid routines coupled with US Government inquiries into the quality of Peloton products has led to significant declines in demand for their expensive bikes which also need an expensive monthly subscription to operate.

Late last year Peloton introduced a new marketing strategy that began targeting men as possible customers and worked harder to promote products beyond its stationary bike, such as its treadmill and rower.

“I knew going into this role that it could be risky for many reasons, including potential leadership changes,” Weinberg wrote in a longer post confirming her departure on LinkedIn last week.

Peloton said it is seeking a successor to Weinberg, with CEO Stern overseeing marketing in the meantime.

This week CEO Peter Stern said Peloton continues to invest in long-term brand marketing as well as its sales-driven counterpart, known as performance marketing. Net churn, or the percentage of people dropping their subscriptions, was lower in the quarter in part due to marketing aimed at bringing back lapsed customers, the company said.