In 2018, the company made a splash by reducing its emphasis on weight loss and focusing more on healthy living.
After decades of emphasizing personal responsibility and behavior change, WeightWatchers is embracing clinical weight loss treatments and is cutting back on the in-person meetings that once defined the company.
WW, as it’s been known since 2018, is trying to find its financial footing, having lost more than a quarter of a billion dollars in 2022 after a pivot to “wellness” faltered and the pandemic cratered in-person attendance.
The company is cutting more than 300 in-person meeting locations, or about 29% of its footprint, many of them in urban areas like Chicago and Washington, D.C. that were leased on a month-to-month basis.
WW members flooded the company’s Facebook account with distressed posts — some of them threatening to cancel their memberships — after learning their meetings were ending or shifting to virtual gatherings.
Around the same time many members were told their in-person meetings were done, the company announced a deal to acquire Sequence, a telehealth platform that offers prescriptions to newly popular weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy.
“It’s a recognition finally of the fact that there are biological and genetic underpinnings to obesity — and that in some cases willpower alone is not enough,” WW CEO Sima Sistani tells Axios.
The intrigue: Sistani, who joined the company in March 2022, acknowledges that the most devoted WeightWatchers members might be started to hear her say that.
“But that’s even more reason why it’s important for us to acknowledge it and to lead from a point of science,” she said, adding that the company must provide “a clinical pathway to those who need it” and wants to help end the “ stigma” surrounding obesity.
In 2018, the company made a splash by reducing its emphasis on weight loss and focusing more on healthy living.
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