Product1 publisher2 min readPublished
Putnam follows Mirror's solo screen with a 24-inch table built for the whole room
Brynn Putnam's new company makes a touchscreen table built for several people at once. The evidence offered that households want one is a WHO loneliness classification and a hotel-sponsored poll about experiences.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- Brynn Putnam's new company, Board, makes a 24-inch touchscreen table that recognizes physical game pieces and gestures, built for a group sitting around it instead of one person in front of a screen.
- Her previous company, the connected-fitness firm Mirror, sold to Lululemon for $500 million in cash less than three years after she founded it.
- The WHO's Commission on Social Connection classified loneliness as a defining global health challenge in June of last year, linking it to roughly 870,000 deaths a year.
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Why it matters
- constraint Board's usage ceiling is set by how often several people in a household sit down at the same time, a limit a solo fitness screen never had.
- decision Anyone pricing a co-presence device is competing with the board game already in the closet.
- precedent Collaborative Holdings gives founders in this category a route that does not require a hardware-scale exit, so a profitable trade school can count as a win.
Putnam told a StrictlyVC audience in New York's West Village that Mirror came out of her own life at the time, pregnant with her first child and running brick-and-mortar fitness studios [5]. She used technology, as she put it, to work on "myself, my body, my fitness, my reflection" [6]. Her household now has seven people in it, up from three [4]. TechCrunch reports that Board was built with the opposite in mind [7].
The founder story is good; the product test is thin. TechCrunch's account does not include a price or a ship date for Board [17]. Before a launch like this I would want one number in front of me: the share of sessions with more than one person at the table in week twelve. Session count alone will look healthy for a month on novelty and then flatten.
The market evidence offered for the category is softer than the health evidence. Two-thirds of Americans told a Harris Poll sponsored by Marriott Bonvoy that they were prioritizing experiences such as travel over material purchases this year, and the same share said retail shopping now feels too generic [12]. The poll was paid for by a hotel loyalty program and found that people want experiences more than things, while Board asks a household to buy a thing.
Tristan Walker is selling the class. Heirloom is buying and scaling fine-craft trade schools, starting with a San Francisco leatherworking school founded by Hermes's first American artisan-ambassador [9]. His own exit was the smaller one. Walker & Company Brands went to Procter & Gamble on undisclosed terms, reported in the $20 million to $40 million range [8]. Against Mirror's $500 million in cash [1], that is a gap of between 12 and 25 times [18].
Audrey Gelman's Six Bells Countryside Inn has 11 rooms in the Hudson Valley and runs a monthly murder-mystery dinner with actors planted in the crowd [14]. Gelman gets paid every time a group assembles. The New York Times reported this summer that guests there routinely stay in the bar past midnight and trade numbers with strangers [15].
What sorts this category is whether the product causes people to gather or gets used because they had already gathered, and whether the money arrives once at purchase or on every gathering. Board bills once and then depends on repeat assembly it does not control [3]. Six Bells bills per assembly [14]. Andy Dunn's Pie, five years old, has answered the first of those three different ways, moving from friend-matching app to event-discovery tool to what he calls a "social life operating system" anchored by "Community Homes" [13].
What to watch
- A price and a ship date for Board, which would show whether it is positioned as a console or as furniture.
- Whether Heirloom buys a second trade school, and whether Collaborative Holdings funds it.
- Whether Board ends up sold to households or into venues where a host is paid per gathering.