When billionaire real estate tycoon Stephen Ross decided to host a fundraiser for Donald Trump last summer, it’s unlikely he was thinking much about SoulCycle. The spinning-class chain is a small piece of his $60 billion empire, Related Companies, which controls 13,000 apartment rentals, 5,500 luxury condos, 60,000 housing units, and 30 million square feet of commercial real estate around the country. It’s equally unlikely that SoulCycle’s customers—an army of spinning fanatics who built the company into a billion-dollar juggernaut—had given much thought to Ross.
At least not until the morning of August 7, when Shannon Coulter, founder of #GrabYourWallet, which organizes boycotts of companies that have financial ties to Donald Trump, alerted them. “This Friday the SoulCycle and Equinox Fitness chairman is throwing a fundraising lunch for Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign. Tickets are $100,000 each. Adding to the list,” she tweeted. Almost immediately, SoulCycle devotees took to social media and the streets to publicly cut ties with the company, whose message of inclusion and self-acceptance seemed antithetical to the Trump administration’s policies. “Soulcycle has no soul,” read the placard of one Los Angeles protester.
While Coulter has issued calls to boycott dozens of other companies over the years, including AT&T, Bank of America, and Boeing, this one appears to be particularly effective. Week-by-week attendance at SoulCycle dropped steadily in August, and dipped by 7.5% in the first week of September, according to data analysis firm Earnest Research. Second Measure, which tracks consumer spending, found that SoulCycle had nearly 13% fewer U.S. customers make purchases in August than a year prior. Coulter, who deliberately called out SoulCycle in her tweet rather than one of Ross’s other companies, is not surprised. “I know how people feel about SoulCycle,” she tells me. The company’s deeply personal connection to its customers—its vaunted “cult brand” appeal—made their sense of betrayal more profound.
Most of us don’t think of ourselves as susceptible to cults. But at this point, billions of us have been drawn in by some iteration of one. Nearly every major brand we interact with uses at least some tactics that are, by design, cultish. Steve Jobs wasn’t selling devices so much as an affinity—to him, to other Mac users, and to a more egalitarian vision of computing—in the same way that religions make people feel connected to one another and a shared system of values. Lululemon founder Chip Wilson infused his company with ideas about personal fulfillment that were drawn directly from Landmark, the controversial, cultlike self-help organization.
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