Ora wins the young women and loses the gym rats, and that’s okay

Dorothy Kilroy has seen her company’s smart ring on some very famous fingers. Mark Zuckerberg wears one. So does Jack Dorsey. Prince Harry too. But when Oura’s chief commercial officer at the Elevate conference in Toronto sat down with this editor last week, she surprised me by saying that the company’s fastest-growing user segment isn’t tech billionaires or wellness-obsessed CEOs. They are women in their early twenties.

It highlighted an interesting moment for Oura. The 13-year-old Finnish health tech company invented the smart ring category and turned it into a billion-dollar company. But competitors are now circling, including Samsung with its Galaxy Ring phone, Ultrahuman with its opt-out offer, and Whoop with its sports performance magic. Each of them promises to take a bite out of Ora’s leadership.

The question isn’t whether Oura is the winner now, it clearly is with 80% of the smart ring market. The question is whether it can maintain that leadership as the wearables market fragments across demographics and use cases, and beyond that, whether Oura even needs to appeal to every demographic to succeed.

Kilroy spent eight years at Airbnb before joining Oura three years ago, and she’s watched both companies scale in the same way — through word of mouth. She suggested that 90% of Airbnb’s revenue is directly related to people taking vacations; At Aura, people rave about their sleep results.

This organic enthusiasm is especially strong among so-called corporate athletes, or high-performance professionals who are trying to optimize their health to stay active. These are people who have realized that running on fumes isn’t actually a sustainable career strategy, or, as Kilroy described them on stage, “people who are trying to be at the top of their game. They want to make sure they sleep. They want to know how to exercise. They want to take care of their metabolic health.”

It’s a demographic — largely Millennials and Generation X with disposable income — that has made Oura so successful. The company said it doubled its revenues last year and is on track to double them again this year. Even more impressive, Kilroy says, is that Oura’s retention at the 12-month mark is in the high 80s, while other wearables languish in the low 30s. People actually keep wearing this thing.

However, there is a new wrinkle. While Ora has captured the professional class, younger consumers, especially young people obsessed with gains and recovery, are gravitating elsewhere. For example, the Whoop fitness band seems to have become the unofficial uniform for serious athletes and their gym bros.

The competition got a little heated a few weeks ago. Whoop, founded in Boston 13 years ago, announced a new blood testing service just one day before Oura announced its blood testing partnership with Quest Diagnostics. When asked about the timing, Kilroy instead focused on the value Oura brings to members. But the near-simultaneous rollout suggests that both companies see the same future: integrating wearable data with actual clinical biomarkers.

Then there’s Ultrahuman, who plays the naughty underdog. At $349 (often $299 on sale), it costs the same as Oura upfront but gets rid of the $5.99 monthly subscription that Oura charges its users. Despite looking very similar, reviewers generally like the Oura’s paint and design. However, the idea of ​​“no subscription” resonates with some younger buyers who are already suffering from subscription fatigue due to Netflix, Spotify and other monthly fees.

Kilroy brushes off concern that Oura will lose customers to price-sensitive buyers. “When you introduce a new pricing model, there’s always risk,” she said on stage, then again pointed to those retention numbers. “Our members get great value from [our product] and [are] Happy to keep pushing.”

In fact, Kilroy doesn’t seem particularly concerned about capturing every demographic. Instead, it focused on keeping core Oura users happy while attracting new segments organically. Young women are becoming part of that core market – a trend she credits with a broader shift, though Ora also recognizes the opportunity this shift presents. “We see them drinking less alcohol,” Kilroy said. “They are really focused on their mental health.”

This momentum has led Ora to double down on features like cycle tracking and fertility insights. “Because of our accuracy in taking temperature, we have a very high degree of accuracy in detecting ovulation, about 97%,” Kilroy explained. The company also recently introduced perimenopause features and expanded pregnancy capabilities.

In other words, Oura – at least for now – is more focused on serving its growing female base rather than chasing young athletes calculating their VO2 max. As Kilroy told me: “We’re not just fitness trackers. We’re a health platform… What we really focus on is preventive health so we avoid burnout, we avoid illness, [and] We’re getting early detection of really important clinical and health-related diseases.

As Kilroy learned at Airbnb, she said, “You have to keep your eyes focused on your race and the features and products you’re shipping.”

It’s a smart game. The market for people who want to improve sleep, manage stress, and generally not feel bad is arguably much larger than the market for athletes obsessed with their training load.

The numbers also support this strategy. Oura now sells through 4,000 retail stores and has 1,000 partners leveraging its API. Kilroy says it also employs more than 30 PhDs and MDs, and that it collaborates with research heavyweights such as UC San Francisco, UC Berkeley, and Stanford. This level of clinical validation creates a moat that competitors cannot easily imitate.

A blood test is just one vector. Late last year, Oura partnered with a maker of wearable devices that track blood sugar levels — Dexcom — to monitor metabolic health, allowing users to overlay continuous glucose data with their ring meters. Kilroy experienced this firsthand for nine months. “I couldn’t believe how much stress was affecting her,” she said, describing the rise in glucose levels during particularly grueling meetings. “All I want to do is run and eat a pound of chocolate when I’m stressed,” she added, smiling. “This is almost like putting a bomb on top of your already high blood glucose.”

Oura’s growth has not been positive in PR. This summer, the company came under pressure over a $96 million deal to sell rings to the Department of Defense, with security provided by software and analytics company Palantir. Privacy advocates have raised concerns about surveillance and data sharing — which makes sense when dealing with biometric data and defense contracts.

But on stage, Kilroy was resolute. “We do not pass our member data to the US government,” she said. “When we work with the United States government and the data they’re looking for on their forces in the Army or in the Air Force, that data is passed on to them.”

When asked what Ora had learned from this financial windfall-turned-PR debacle, Kilroy added: “There’s a lot of misinformation out there, and it’s often difficult once misinformation starts to take hold to put the genie back in the bottle.”

The controversy surrounding the Department of Defense makes something important clear: When a device tracks your sleep, your fertility, and your high stress levels during the workday — when your body knows better than you do — trust is paramount. Oura’s retention numbers indicate that people trust it; This summer’s backlash has underscored that trust is fragile. Which makes the company’s refusal to chase every flashy demographic look less like playing it safe and more like discipline.

So could Oura take over all of Gen Z? Maybe not. But maybe that’s good. While competitors like Whoop limit themselves to specific markets like athletic performance, Oura is betting that there are more people trying to avoid burnout than athletes obsessed with recovery metrics. For now, at least, it seems no one is changing the rings to prove the company wrong.