SoulCycle throws workout party for ad exec’s cancer-stricken daughter
A few years ago, Larry Vincent, who heads up the United Talent Agency’s branding practice, discovered SoulCycle. It was a time when his blood pressure was shooting up and his doctor had advised that exercise was the only way to bring it down. He got addicted to Soul — as most people do.
But it wasn’t until this past weekend that he realized just how much he had SoulCycle to thank for.
Vincent’s daughter, Jordan, 16, has had cancer for years. When she kept hearing about her dad’s SoulCycle addiction, she started begging to go along with him to the class. “When I was little, you took me to the gym,” she told him — in fact, Vincent used to take her to his local gym when she was much younger. But SoulCycle is a tough workout: her legs have severe neuropathy, and it just wasn’t possible.
So Vincent emailed SoulCycle asking if they could just stop by when it was closed so she could see what it looked like. “I thought they would respond,” he told Digiday. “But I thought it would take a while and at most they’d offer to have a manager give Jordan a tour of the studio.”
What happened next left him “dumbfounded,” he said.
He got a response from SoulCycle headquarters. Caroline Schafer, who runs content for the brand, emailed her team and the local Santa Monica studio and said: “Let’s do something special for them.”
The brand threw a special party for Jordan, with a 15-minute modified workout taught by her dad’s instructor, Molly, with all her friends around. Jordan loved it. Each bike was decorated with glow-in-the-dark bracelets; and the instructor even played Nick Jonas to start things up. “I rode next to my daughter in a SoulCycle class!” Vincent wrote in a blog post later. “Read that last sentence again.”
“It was a beautiful Saturday in Los Angeles. Seventy degrees and not a cloud in the sky. Just gorgeous,” said Vincent. “The fact that so many of their staff showed up to ride with Jordan when they could have been out and doing something else was not lost on me.
“It was special because I know how much this really meant to my daughter. She is telling people she took a class with her dad. That’s not something a lot of people would believe. But we have proof. And SoulCycle made it real. That was a real class,” Vincent added.
“We’re so happy we could do it,” said Gabby Etrog-Cohen, vp public relations and brand strategy at SoulCycle. “We’re a company of ‘yes.’ We want to answer every call.”
Photo courtesy of Larry Vincent.
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