WW CEO: We Want to Be the 'Everything App For Wellness'
*By Kavitha Shastry*
The company formerly known as Weight Watchers is in the midst of a rebranding campaign, and CEO Mindy Grossman said it's all a matter of promoting a healthier lifestyle both for the body and mind.
"If you have Amazon for shopping, and Netflix for entertainment, and Spotify for music," she told Cheddar in an interview Thursday, "we should be your everything app for wellness, from the time you get up to the time you go to sleep."
Grossman was speaking at the WW Freestyle Cafe: BKLYN at Brooklyn's Barclays Center, where the company, now called simply WW ($WTW), unveiled a year-long partnership with the sports and concert venue. The cafe will offer a menu selected by celebrity chef Cat Cora, featuring healthy alternatives to traditional stadium fare.
Its opening comes a little more than a week after WW dropped the "Weight" from its name ー a move meant to convey that being healthy and being skinny are not necessarily one in the same. As part of that strategy, the company also partnered with meditation platform Headspace to integrate original content into its app and launched a new rewards program to incentivize users to adopt a wellness program.
Since taking over as CEO last summer, Grossman has made a point of positioning WW as more of a wellness brand than a weight-loss company. The company launched meal-kits sold at grocery stores and changed up recipes for products that contained artificial sweeteners or other ingredients. She's also upped the star quotient of the brand, adding DJ Khaled to a roster of spokespeople that already included Oprah Winfrey.
While WW stock had been on a tear for the first year of Grossman's tenure ー shares more than tripled through this July ー they have pulled back from record highs and fell sharply after the company's last earnings report. WW shed about 100,000 subscribers during the second quarter, sending shares down, despite posting better than expected earnings and revenues.
The company is expected to report third quarter earnings in early November.
For full interview [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/weight-watchers-becomes-ww-expands-into-barclays-center).
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