Sonos laid off around 100 employees on Wednesday, according to a statement. The edge. Employees in the company’s marketing department reportedly bore the brunt of the blow. The cuts come as Sonos tries to simultaneously sell its new Ace headphones to the public and fix the revamped Sonos mobile app, which CEO Patrick Spence said was the result of its push for faster development.
The company confirmed the layoffs to The edge. “We have made the difficult decision to say goodbye to approximately 100 team members, representing 6 percent of the company,” Spence said in a statement. The company is also reportedly “closing” some customer service offices, including one in Amsterdam that is scheduled to close later this year. Sonos’ LinkedIn page lists 1,800 employees worldwide, and the six percent figure cited in the statement would mean it’s about 1,650 employees. The company’s last layoffs in June 2023 cut seven percent of its workforce.
Although Engadget’s review was mostly impressed with the company’s new Ace headphones, complaints about the app largely overshadowed the highly anticipated hardware launch. The app launch, which was supposed to fix “performance and reliability issues” and rebuild the developer platform with “modern programming languages that allow us to drive more innovation faster,” was a debacle. It caused headaches for the company’s most loyal customers and threatened to drag the brand down as it forayed into new product categories. It even led to the delay of two new products that would have otherwise been ready for market.
The new Sonos app for Android, iOS and desktop launched in May without core features like sleep timers and alarms. Customers reported problems moving speakers around in different rooms, some only working intermittently and problems performing other basic tasks. Others even said they often couldn’t get the app to load on the first try.
To give a sense of just how broken the app is, Spence laid out a timeline for the fix in a blog post late last month. July and August were dedicated to improving stability when adding new products and implementing music library improvements. A window of August and September is reserved for improving volume response, UI, stability, and error handling. September and October will see tweaks to alert consistency and reliability and restore playlist and queue editing. Settings improvements are also addressed. (Phew!)
Today’s announcement was not well received by the company’s Reddit community, which has been vocal about its problems since the app’s launch. Some suggested the layoffs reported today would affect 100 employees, when one high-profile firing would have done the trick. “I have to say, I didn’t have both feet in the door to fire Patrick Spence, but any CEO that lets their employees down and then signs the paper firing them is a sleazy motherfucker,” wrote u/teryan2006.
“Since I took over as CEO, one of my main focuses has been the need for Sonos to move faster,” Spence said on a conference call in July. “That led to my promise to deliver at least two new products every year – a promise we have successfully delivered on. However, with the app, my pursuit of speed backfired.”
