Five brands.
One platform.
No compromise.
600,000 premium members. Five distinct brands. I led product design for Equinox+, building a digital experience as exclusive as the physical one — without flattening what made each brand distinct. Shipped 0 → MVP in 3 months.
Beat Peloton
without becoming Peloton.
Equinox’s answer was a connected fitness app — five premium brands, one platform, none of them flattened. The constraint that governed every decision: digital had to feel as exclusive as the West Hollywood flagship. SoulCycle couldn’t become just another class type. Equinox couldn’t become Peloton.
One platform.
Four members. One prioritization call.
What we found.
What we built.
Each decision began with a member insight, made a concrete architectural bet, and shipped.
Live, audio, video.
Same platform. Different everything else.
Each format has its own design language — live for real-time energy, wattage, leaderboard; audio for immersion, where the tab bar recedes and only the sound remains. One activity history underneath all of it.
The instructor
is the product.
The retention signal: Members who followed at least one instructor within their first 30 days retained at nearly double the rate of those who didn’t. The clearest signal in the data — and it wasn’t in the brief.
The IA implication: If followership predicted retention, the instructor — not the content category, not the brand — had to be the primary object members navigate from.
I spent a week in the data before the architecture became obvious: followership. Follow in one tap — their next class surfaces to the top of your feed immediately. The instructor profile became a destination, not a pass-through.
Alex.
Commit with
full context.
Every signal that matters — instructor, duration, level, brand, live status — is above the fold. No surprises after you’ve blocked out the time. The instructor tip before every class was the detail I wanted most: it turns a transactional booking page into a moment of connection.
Five brands.
Zero compromise.
The core systems decision: shared where behavior needed consistency, variable where brand meaning mattered. Navigation, activity history, scheduling, and account infrastructure are shared. Color, typography, photography, motion, and class-card expression are variable — defined per brand by a token architecture, not hardcoded per screen.
This meant SoulCycle’s Creative Director could own SoulCycle’s visual DNA without touching Pure Yoga’s. Five independent brand expressions. One component base. One deployment.
Club and digital.
One habit loop.
One calendar — digital classes and club visits, color-coded by brand. The QR card is the decision that made everything else stick: when the app is your membership credential at 200+ clubs, opening it becomes automatic.
Equinox+ launched to
a 4.8★ App Store rating.
Top review themes mapped directly to the five decisions: members cited instructor discovery and followership, the quality of the live class experience, and the ability to move between brands without losing context. The rating reflected what the design prioritized — connection over competition, brand fidelity over generic convenience, and a digital product that made the physical membership feel more valuable, not less.