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Early last year, I called out three disruptors worth watching. All three delivered.
2021 recap
Elon Musk had a spectacular 2021. Fueled by investor enthusiasm for Tesla, in January he became the world’s richest man. By September, he had over $200 billion. Just a month later, he passed $300 billion—that’ll buy you 2 million fully loaded, self-driving Tesla Model S Plaids, or well over 6 million base-level Model 3s if you’re feeling a bit less flashy.
While the rest of the industry slowed to a supply chain-constrained crawl, Tesla grew 87%, delivering nearly a million vehicles worldwide. It made $2.3 billion in profit, nine times what it generated in 2020. By the fourth quarter, Tesla was selling more vehicles in the U.S. than GMC, Lexus, BMW and Mercedes.
Musk’s other sub-brand, SpaceX, celebrated its 100th successful launch, and all 31 Falcon 9 flights scheduled for 2021 took off and landed pretty much as planned. SpaceX also made Musk the first billionaire to put an all-civilian crew into orbit, where they spent three days circling the Earth and irritating his pal Jeff Bezos.
Musk is a brand with no ad budget but plenty of juice. How he used his 75 million Twitter followers (72 million more than Bezos) is fodder for endless more tales. Meanwhile, in the least interesting thing that happened to Musk, Time named him 2021 Person of the Year.
Peloton was equally fascinating, if less obviously successful. I predicted that the audacity of its vision would make it impossible for the likes of Echelon to catch up. True, but irrelevant.
Peaking at $49 billion in market cap, Peloton had shed 76% of its value by year’s end. Frothy investor interest turned frosty as average monthly workouts per subscription dropped for three straight quarters as people began making their way back to the gym and a series of ego-assisted marketing blunders put the company in play.
Investment firm Blackwells Capital launched a campaign that cost founder and CEO John Foley his job. But Blackwells also called Peloton a “highly coveted asset,” with “the hallmarks of an extremely valuable business, which needs to be protected.”
It’s enough to put Peloton back on the list of brands to watch in 2022. As we move into a hybrid home/gym exercise world, however, we need a better measure of sustained brand engagement than monthly workouts.
Rounding out last year’s list, online music education innovator TrueFire Studios enjoyed 47% revenue growth and nearly doubled its subscriber base. It acquired competitor ArtistWorks, added marquee teachers like blues rock guitar icon Joe Bonamassa, and built an immersive user experience that allows students to play “in the band” alongside award-winning artists and session players.
The entire virtual music making and learning category is seeing what appears to be lasting gains from the work-from-home half of our new reality. That’s in no small part because the tech-enabled learning experiences that TrueFire is pioneering, perhaps unlike connected fitness, are radically superior to away-from-home alternatives.
On to 2022
Beyond Peloton, who should we be watching this year? In an increasingly turbulent world, this will be a longer, stranger list.
Let’s first go where no one wants to venture. As the late P.J. O’Rourke quoted one of our fine senators, “Republicans are an ideological coalition, Democrats are a coalition of ideologues.” That gives the Democratic Party significant structural barriers to successful brand building: A brand without a singular point of view is a brand without traction. They need to find their compelling “why” fast, or they’ll make Peloton 2021 look like a Grand Effie winner.
Still swirling in politics is Spotify—increasingly reminiscent of Facebook, a brand that exhausts me too much to put on this list. Spotify chose podcast host Joe Rogan over Neil Young and Joni Mitchell for a simple reason: It’s in the final stretch of turning podcasts into a big, high-margin business. Its recent acquisition of under-the-radar startups Podsights and Chartable lets Spotify pioneer targetable, trackable in-podcast ads and become the YouTube of talk audio.
Also worth keeping an eye on is Allbirds, one of only 30 publicly traded B Corps. It makes the most comfortable shoes ever but seems to be struggling to transcend the “Silicon Valley cool” that first put it on the map.
It also remains to be seen whether the “-verse” side of Meta delivers a Second Life where any of us really feel good hanging out.
Then there’s Ryan Reynolds, a very different strain of brand than Musk, and his pet project Maximum Effort. Would an ambitious brand really want to entrust its future to an agency that proudly proclaims it exists “for the personal amusement of Hollywood Star Ryan Reynolds”? Due diligence, it appears, still takes time—and still matters.
For the last official entry on my list, I’m choosing one that surprised me by surfacing several times when I asked this semester’s Duke students what brands they admire: Madhappy. It’s a streetwear business started by four high school friends who managed to get funding from luxury juggernaut LVMH.
The appeal isn’t the apparel. What resonates is the message: Madhappy is a lifestyle brand visibly promoting positivity, optimism and mental health. Given all that’s happening in the world, let’s all pray it has a most excellent year.
