Emma Lovewell Is the Drake of Fitness

Ride with Peloton's Emma Lovewell long enough and her language stops staying in the class. It turns up in members' everyday lives, in their hardest physical and mental moments, and maybe even in how they describe that lumpy-ass rug they don't like. Eventually, you stop thinking about where the language came from. It just gets repeated, the way lyrics to a catchy song do.

It makes sense once you know what she did before rising to the top of the fitness world. Before the Super Bowl commercial, before Ellen called her out, before the bestseller, Lovewell was a DJ and a professional dancer. Music was already part of her brand, with Peloton describing her as a music lover who builds her rides around the shape of a playlist.

The back-catalog

A Drake-shaped career has four core properties: ubiquity that spills past the category, a catalog people are loyal to rather than a single hit, range that would feel incoherent for a narrower artist, and an audience that follows the person instead of the subject. Lovewell has all four.

Fitness is the entry point. The rest is the back-catalog. Beyond her tenure as a Senior Instructor at Peloton, Lovewell founded the wellness brand Live Learn Lovewell and has published her Love List newsletter in some form since 2015. The advantage is that the audience has somewhere to go beyond the platform that introduced her.

"The majority of my following comes from Peloton," Lovewell said in a recent interview collab with State of Brand and BuzzFeed Business News. "They're mostly Peloton members, and they're very health and wellness-focused, very fitness-focused. But what are all the things that go along with fitness and exercise that I can also offer people? What are the lifestyle things that will help you achieve your fitness goals?"

Everything around fitness became material, with a studio behind it and a team to back it up. "I have somebody that helps me with recipe creation," she said. "And I have an editor, too, so we'll meet quarterly and just brainstorm."

Most creators chase an audience and then make things for it. Lovewell did the reverse, publishing since 2015, two years before she ever taught a Peloton class. She built the catalog before there was a Peloton audience to hear it, and eleven years on, the audience follows the person, not the subject.

Seasons instead of a content calendar

Most creators run a content calendar against their life. Lovewell runs her life as the calendar. The quarterly planning meeting is really a seasonal one. "What foods are in season? What kind of recipes do we want to highlight? What am I doing personally that I want to share, with travel, with family updates, with home stuff?"

“I am a gardener, so I am very affected by the seasons in gardening, and the way that I eat, and my mood, and all of the things,” she says. It goes past produce. “Sometimes I'm in a season of work. And then sometimes I'm in a season of family. And the balance of all the things is something I'm constantly playing with.”

So the garden decides what she cooks, what she cooks decides what she writes, and a season of family decides how much of any of it there is that month. She never has to invent a topic, because the garden already picked one.

There are levels

The persona is a persona. Lovewell will tell you that herself. "It is funny, having friends who don't know me in the fitness world," she says. "Maybe they'll come take my class and they're like, wow, you really just turn it on." She goes further than most people in her position will. "There's levels to my authenticity and my persona. There's me at home, which is very different than me in front of tens of thousands of people on the bike, on camera."

She says this like it's the fun part, not the confession. "It is still all based in who I am, but it is kind of fun to play. It is fun to have a little more performative side to myself." The examples come fast, sweatpants and hands in the dirt, heels and a dress. "I love my rock. I love some Billy Joel. But I also love some JLo. I can be all of the things." Her read on why it lands: "Most people are multiple things. I think people can identify with that, that you don't have to just be one thing."

The north star goes dark sometimes, too. "Sometimes I feel very motivated, and my north star is so clear, and I know exactly where I want to go. And then sometimes I really don't. Sometimes I'm like, am I doing the right thing? I question myself." She calls it writer's block, then names the fear underneath it. "There's so much going on in the world right now, do people even care about what I'm growing in my garden?" Her answer is maintenance. "I'm still growing, and I need to be motivated in order to motivate other people."

Furniture was the stress test

Since 2023, Lovewell has worked with Arhaus, starting with one room and extending to her living room, office, and outdoor space. On paper it's a category jump. "There was never one comment or message or anything that was like, why is a fitness instructor working with a furniture brand," Lovewell says. "Not one person has said that."

Hannah Wickberg, Associate Director of PR, Partnerships, and Experiential Marketing at Arhaus, has a theory about why. "You guys don't even know how connected people feel through their Peloton instructors," she says. "There's an emotive piece to being on the bike and your instructor. I would compare it to maybe your favorite musician, or maybe for some people, art that moves you."

The point of view travels

The point of view behind the partnership is one she's been publishing for a decade. "I never want to have a room that is not being used," she says. "That just feels like a waste of space, like a formal living room. It looks nice in photos, but why are you paying for heating and cooling in a space that never gets used?" The philosophy goes back to a childhood home on Martha's Vineyard of maybe a thousand square feet, and years in New York apartments where you could see every room from one spot. When she and her partner bought a larger house in 2020, the size was the problem.

The rule that comes out of it is two-sided. "Things can't be too precious. But I also want good quality items. I have some items that I've had since our first partnership three years ago, and they're in wonderful condition." The proof is on the patio. When her daughter started crawling, the coffee table's edges became a hazard, so Lovewell took it out. Arhaus replaced it with a cushioned ottoman a toddler could walk straight into.

Eleven years of publishing, a Peloton catalog, a furniture partnership in its third year, a garden that sets the schedule. The audience has moved with all of it. "My audience is growing with me. They're aging with me," she says. "You just sort of have to trust that your people will come."

Which is a musician's strategy more than a marketer's. It's also exactly how she describes teaching a class. "The people who like my music will come and find me. The people who don't like my music can go find somebody else. And that's the beauty of it."