Lululemon Acquired Mirror To Create the Fitness Power Couple of Our Dreams

Digital fitness is showing no signs of slowing down, and Lululemon is putting some serious skin in the game: On Monday, the Canadian athleisure brand announced that it would be acquiring MIRROR—the revolutionary home fitness system—for a whopping $500 million.

“We are thrilled to officially become a part of the Lululemon family,” MIRROR founder and CEO Brynn Putnam said in a statement. “As part of Lululemon, MIRROR can further strengthen its position and accelerate its growth by leveraging Lululemon’s deep relationships with its guests, ambassadors, and communities, as well as the company’s infrastructure, including its store network and e-commerce channels, to acquire new users.” According to Business Wire, MIRROR will operate independently within Lululemon, and Putnam will remain in her post as CEO.

Earlier this year, the two companies worked together to create meditation classes hosted by Gabby Bernstein, providing a small taste of what users can expect from this new fitness power duo going forward. The partnership will include a new slew of meditation and workout content led by Lululemon ambassadors. “The acquisition of MIRROR is an exciting opportunity to build upon that vision, enhance our digital and interactive capabilities, and deepen our roots in the sweatlife,” Lululemon CEO Calvin McDonald said in a statement. According to Lululemon, MIRROR is well on its way to bring in upwards of $100 million in revenue by the end of 2020.

“The acquisition will enable us to innovate together—You can expect new, immersive content experiences, uniting both MIRROR’s digital technology and Lululemon’s global footprint” Putnam tells Well+Good. “We are just scratching the surface of the powerful experiences that MIRROR can provide. I look forward to partnering with Lululemon to see what we can create together.”

For those who don’t know the at home fitness equipment by name, MIRROR launched in September, 2018 with live and on-demand digital fitness classes that were streamed onto a sleek device that looks like—you guessed it—a mirror. Putnam, who previously owned a HIIT studio in NYC (and was once a Lululemon ambassador herself), set out to bring all of the best qualities of boutique fitness— sense of community, form corrections from trainers, a way to track your metrics—into people’s homes with a machine that wouldn’t crowd their space or mess with their design aesthetic.

The brand quickly amassed an A-list following (Kate Hudson, Reese Witherspoon, and Jennifer Aniston are all fans) and hundreds of thousands of Instagram likes, proving that she was onto something major. Last year, the brand introduced fully-integrated digital personal training onto its machines by way of two-way cameras, and Putnam has hinted at her plans to expand MIRROR’s offerings “beyond fitness” into things like telehealth and e-commerce (we’d put down some big bucks that this partnership will change the face of retail as we know it).

In June, 2019—a mere nine months after it launched—the company was valued at $300 million. The fact that it sold for nearly double only a year later is a testament to the immense growth the digital fitness space has seen in 2020, which can be largely attributed to COVID-19-related stay-at-home orders across the country. In the month of March, Google searches for “at-home workouts” rose by nearly 500 percent; Peloton’s stock ticked up 29 percent between March 10 and April 10; and Obé saw ten times as many downloads in March as in February. The pandemic has pushed digital fitness to progress faster than ever, and has transformed the way we work out for the better. With its latest big ticket investment, Lululemon is hedging the bet that there’s a whole lot more growth to come, and we can’t wait to see what that looks like.