Lululemon is throwing in the towel on Mirror

Lululemon is calling it quits on Mirror. And it’s tagging Peloton for help parachuting out of connected fitness.

As part of efforts to wind down the business, Bloomberg reports that Lululemon plans on ending hardware sales this year. The companion app will be made unavailable to new users at the end of 2023. Lululemon will continue to offer service and support for existing Mirror owners. According to Bloomberg, those changes will start taking effect on November 1st.

To ease the blow, Lululemon has inked a five-year deal with Peloton to provide ongoing content to existing users, as well as develop co-branded apparel. As part of the agreement, Lululemon will start offering Peloton classes on its Mirror device and Lululemon Studio app. Paying Lululemon Studio subscribers will get access to thousands of Peloton classes, videos, and series, while users on the free tier will get a smaller selection of Peloton content. Peloton will in turn sell co-branded Lululemon apparel in its stores and online starting October 11th. The two companies will also host a series of in-person community events.

As for non-Peloton content, Lululemon will stop making its own exercise videos next year, and won’t feature third-party content either. It’s also decided to discontinue a digital-only subscription it introduced earlier this year.

This Lululemon Mirror news serves as a reminder of connected fitness’s Achilles heel. Most connected fitness hardware is locked to a single company’s content. If that content well dries up, you’ve got a bricked device that you paid hundreds or thousands for. At the very least, the deal with Peloton helps Mirror owners get a few more years of use out of their devices and a longer lead time to finding an alternative. However, it’s much less risky to buy a non-connected piece of fitness equipment and pay for a cheaper fitness app subscription.

Peloton itself has been pointedly shifting away from hardware toward subscriptions. Earlier this year, it rebranded its app and launched three new app-only subscription tiers. And just yesterday, Peloton announced Tom Cortese, its last remaining co-founder and chief product officer, was stepping down. His replacement, former Twitter executive Nick Caldwell, was described in a press release as having “a proven track record of building and scaling products and services that excite customers.”