Why Whoop Outperformed Halo
Whoop
Amazon Halo showed that a big brand and cheap hardware are not enough in wearables, because this category only works when users feel the device gives them a specific health insight they cannot get elsewhere. Halo tried to bundle basic tracking, body scans, nutrition, and fitness content at low price points, then shut down on July 31, 2023. By contrast, Whoop and Oura each built around a tighter promise, daily recovery and readiness, then layered subscriptions on top.
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Halo launched at $99.99 with a $3.99 monthly membership, then expanded into Halo View, Halo Fitness, Halo Nutrition, and Halo Rise. That created a broad wellness bundle, but not a single killer reason for an athlete or health focused user to keep paying every month.
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Whoop is narrower and more concrete. It tracks sleep, strain, and recovery for performance optimization, which gives users a simple daily loop, wear the band, check recovery, adjust training. Oura followed a similar specialization path and then scaled it into subscriptions, retail, and enterprise.
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The market rewarded specialization. Oura grew from $225M revenue in 2023 to $500M in 2024 and $1B in 2025, with an estimated $11B valuation by October 2025. That is the opposite outcome from Halo, and it suggests recurring revenue in wearables depends more on a strong use case than on hardware breadth.
Going forward, the winners in wearables will look less like general wellness gadgets and more like focused health products with software revenue attached. That favors companies like Whoop that can own a daily decision loop, then expand into coaching, clinical signals, and enterprise programs without losing the core reason people wear the device.