Inside the ‘The Tinkerer Project’: Peloton’s plan to hide rust in their exercise bikes

When Peloton’s share price began to tumble last fall and just months after the connected fitness company’s costly recall of expensive treadmills, its executives faced a new crisis.

Last September, employees at Peloton warehouses, where high-quality Taiwanese-made bikes come in, noticed that the paint was peeling off some of the trainers.

The reason was the accumulation of rust on “invisible parts”of the bike – the inner seat frame and handlebars – and did not affect the integrity of the product, Peloton recently reported to the Financial Times.

Instead of returning the bikes to the manufacturer, executives devised a plan, internally dubbed “Project Tinker”to hide the corrosion, and shipped the machines to customers who paid between $1,495 and $2,495 to buy them.

The project was first featured in FT Magazine last week, but eight current and former Peloton employees in four US states provided additional details about the operation.

They described the plan as a nationwide effort to avoid another costly recall just months after the company’s most tragic episode, the death of a child due to the design of its treadmill.

Internal documents seen by the FT showed that Tinman’s “standard operating procedures”were to fight corrosion with a chemical solution called a “rust converter,”which hides corrosion by reacting “with rust to form a black layer.”Employees said the scheme was named Tinman to avoid terms like “rust”that executives felt were incongruous with Peloton’s quality brand.

Insiders were also outraged by the adoption of the plan, which they claimed ran counter to Peloton’s intended focus on its users, who are referred to as “members”, to create a sense that buyers are more than customers and are part of a larger community. Tinman also drew attention to the company’s quality control process versus achieving aggressive sales targets in search of growth.

“That was the only driving factor in the initial phase of my hatred for the company I fell in love with over the previous year and a half,” said a team leader who tests products before shipping them to customers.

Peloton said at least 6,000 bikes were affected by the problem and that 120 employees conducted “rigorous testing”of the devices to conclude that the rust, which they described as “cosmetic oxidation”, “did not affect the bike’s performance, quality, durability or reliability. “., or the overall experience of the participants”.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, which oversaw the recall of the Peloton treadmill, did not say whether it was alerted to the corrosion problem, but said companies should notify it if they suspect defects “that could pose a significant hazard to the product or… unreasonable risk of serious injury or death.”

The company is in turmoil, with 2,800 job cuts announced this month and co-founder John Foley stepping down as chief executive. Peloton plans to cut its annual costs by $800 million.