New York
The Gentleman Report
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WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani, who driven the corporate into embracing weight-loss medicine, is leaving the placement after a two-year stint.
Below Sistani, the 61-year-old corporate purchased a telehealth platform that attached sufferers with docs who can prescribe weight-loss and diabetes medicine, together with Ozempic and Wegovy, representing a thorough alternate for the carrier that made its title for in-person conferences and portion keep watch over.
“Those medicines have proven, and science has developed to mention, that residing with weight problems is a protracted situation. It’s vital, it doesn’t matter what it manner for our industry, to only be transparent about that. It’s no longer self-discipline on my own,” Sistani prior to now informed The Gentleman Report in regards to the adjustments. “What we at the moment are announcing is we all know higher and it’s on us to do higher in order that we will be able to lend a hand other people really feel certain and destigmatize this dialog round weight problems.”
However the pivot didn’t paintings and the inventory has plummeted 90% 12 months to this point as other people use GLP-1 medicine on their very own quite than via firms equivalent to WeightWatchers. Stocks slipped any other 4% Friday.
The inventory took any other hit in February when megastar investor Oprah Winfrey introduced she was once leaving the corporate’s board and donated all of her inventory to the Nationwide Museum of African American Historical past and Tradition.
Winfrey joined the board in 2015 and purchased a ten% stake, straight away giving the beleaguered corporate relevance.
Tara Comonte, a WeightWatchers board member and a former CEO of Shake Shack, will turn into the meantime CEO efficient straight away, the corporate stated in a unencumber. Previous to becoming a member of the corporate in June 2023, she was once the CEO of a fertility generation corporate.
Comonte’s “confirmed talent to steer cross-functional transformations and power expansion, coupled along with her deep working out of our venture and dedication to our contributors, give us complete self assurance that she is the best chief to persuade WeightWatchers via this pivotal second and place the corporate for sustained luck,” stated Thilo Semmelbauer, chairman of the WeightWatchers’ board.
