Peloton’s Matt Wilpers on Building His Own Brand
Train hard, train smart and always have fun.
That’s the mantra of Matt Wilpers, a popular Peloton instructor who has developed a rabid following of exercise enthusiasts since he joined the fitness company in 2016.
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Wilpers, who teaches cycling, running and, most recently, rowing, has a rich pedigree when it comes to sports. The 39-year-old elite athlete, who competed in Division 1 cross-country and track at Georgia State University and has since participated in countless running, cycling and triathlon races, has been called “the baby-faced assassin” for his killer Peloton workouts. Despite his ubiquitous smile and quick laugh, Wilpers takes his classes and his coaching deadly seriously.
“It all comes down to wanting to help people,” Wilpers said.
Early on in his life, Wilpers thought his future would be finance — he has a master’s in accounting, which is what drew him to New York City to work as a CPA for KPMG and Goldman Sachs. But it wasn’t fulfilling. He took a job at Equinox as a group fitness instructor and entered the pre-med program at NYU. Then, this under-the-radar fitness company called Peloton made him an offer, and his life took a 360-degree turn. Like everything else in his life, Wilpers was all in.
“I’ve always viewed fitness as medicine,” he said. “So I’m just practicing what I preach and using fitness to do good.”
Since he took the plunge into full-time fitness, Wilpers — like many of his fellow instructors such as Olivia Amato, Jess Sims, Cody Rigsby and Alex Toussaint — has built a cult following that reaches well beyond the screens at Peloton. He has his own coaching business where athletes clamor for the chance to buy his Team Wilpers T-shirts, hats and accessories, which are often sold out, and he’s become an ambassador for menswear companies including grooming brand Oars + Alps, retailer Peter Manning and hydration brand Nuum.
And luckily for Wilpers and his colleagues, the struggles of their employer — large losses, equipment recalls, a sinking stock price, a change of top management and the exit of the founders, and an impending rate hike for members at the end of the year — hasn’t seemed to impact them.
Wilpers’ Instagram page, where he posts training tips, personal photos and motivational quotes, boasts more than 277,000 followers — not Taylor Swift-level numbers, but as Jeff Hansen, owner of Peter Manning, a specialty store targeted to short men, said: “He has a tremendous following. It’s not huge but they’re very engaged.” Hansen worked with Wilpers, who is 5 feet 8 inches tall, last year and found that the athlete’s social posts got more results than others influencers with similar numbers of followers. “He’s super-enthusiastic and high energy and the clothes look great on him,” Hansen said. “We saw a nice uptick in traffic and orders following posts to his Instagram account, and I know Matt got a lot of engagement from his followers on the posts related to Peter Manning. It’s always tough to measure the impact of influencers, but this was legitimate. It was very effective and we’re contemplating doing something with him again.”
Launchmetrics, an analytics firm that monitors the fashion industry, said 25 of Wilpers’ Instagram posts since Jan. 1 of this year have amassed a media impact value of $330,000, a metric that measures the worth of the posts.
But how has Wilpers navigated going from fitness instructor and coach to influencer? “I always view myself as my own company,” Wilpers said. “Anything you touch has to be a reflection of you. And part of being your own company is to market yourself. As Denis Morton [another Peloton instructor] once said, ‘If you can’t get out of it, you gotta get into it. I love that quote, I use it over and over and over again.”
Wilpers has learned there’s a lot of trial and error in creating your own brand. “You’re going to make mistakes, you’re going to look stupid,” he said, pointing to a COVID-19-era video he made trying dance cardio at home, which he said was “a total mess.”
To up his game, he turns to the “close knit” group of instructors at Peloton for some tips on how best to use social media. “We always say that when one of us wins, we all win,” he said. “So if I ever have any questions, I can always go talk to them.”
Another thing he’s learned is that the most effective social media strategy revolves around staying true to his mission. “Influencing really forces you to figure out what your brand is. Who are you, what do you stand for? Ground your message and stay authentic and lead by example.”
But to increase his reach, Wilpers said he’s recently started working with his wife, periodontist Jessica Li whom he married in February at a destination wedding in Nicaragua, who is helping him “take more of an analytical approach, which has been fun.”
He’s also started working with a stylist to help him enhance his style. “It was the best decision I’ve made in a long time,” he said. “I go out with my colleagues and they’re all dressed to the nines — they’re natural born influencers. I was a former accountant, so it was either a suit or your pajamas. But now I wear elevated casual and unless my stylist tells me to buy something, I don’t buy anything. It makes my life easy.”
Wilpers said he’ll only work with a company whose values align with his. “At the end of the day, my goal is to help people and brand alignments have to be a win-win for everybody. It’s about making people aware of a great product — something I authentically use. I look for those types of opportunities. It’s not about the short term — those deals rarely do well — it’s about building brand awareness and turning people on to an awesome product that you believe in.”
That’s how he got associated with Oars + Alps, a men’s grooming brand.
“I believe in their mission and what they’re doing — improving men’s skin care,” he said. “I love taking care of my skin. I’ve been doing it since I was a kid. And I think it’s super important. I think that most guys are not doing it or not doing it correctly. But it’s not just about great products with them. It’s about building routines. And as we know in the fitness realm, routines are everything. It’s the same with skin care. So I really love that message.”
The love affair is mutual. Erica LeBlanc, chief executive officer of Oars + Alps, said the six-year-old company had been looking to partner with someone in the active space who was “aspirational and relatable — somebody guys could aspire to.” Her husband suggested Wilpers and she found him to be “the nicest guy on screen and in person. He cares about helping everyone feel like an athlete and reach their personal best. I found that really appealing.”
They signed him as an ambassador last year and since then, he’s become the face of the brand’s Alps Challenge fitness events and has also curated several product kits including the Morning Routine, Surf Essentials and T3, the latter of which is a reference to triathlons. He also helped the company launch its athlete-specific line.
And the partnership is paying off for the brand, which just extended his contract with the athlete. Although it’s hard to draw direct parallels between influencer posts and sales, when a partnership is successful, there’s a halo effect for the brand. Dustin Pickett, strategic engagement manager for Oars + Alps, said videos featuring Wilpers are the best-performing social posts for the company and sales of the company’s sun-related products are more than double last year.
“His promotion is definitely contributing very positively to that,” LeBlanc said. “His audience is so engaged and his social posts don’t seem overly promotional.” As a result, Oars + Alps just shot some new ads with Wilpers and will also be producing a documentary with him later this year.
That will undoubtedly raise his profile even more, which begs the question of how he manages to maintain his privacy as his social standing increases.
“I view people who take my classes as my athletes and I love when they say hello,” he said. “But I try to always keep things professional. And like a lot of runners, I like my alone time to just read and chill.”
So how does Wilpers always manage to stay so upbeat and positive, even on tough days?
“That comes back to my philosophy as a coach and as a human,” he said. “I’ve learned that you can have a negative philosophy or a positive philosophy. A negative philosophy is constantly getting down on your athletes, pushing, giving them kicks in the behind. That never worked for me. I want my athletes to want things for themselves. I think that’s way more powerful.”
As Wilpers looks to the future, he hopes he can continue to inspire athletes and also make his mark on the world.
“I want to align my career with making an impact, specifically on public health,” he said. “We focus a lot on quick fixes — rehab versus prehab — and we can use fitness as medicine. So my goal is to continue working and building great businesses that people want to support that align with my passion.”
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