Sonos has a plan to make you love its speaker system again
Few brands can point to a specific date for their downfall. For Sonos—once the darling of home audio—that date is May 7, 2024, when it rolled out a disastrous app update that left many of its 15 million customers confused by hardware and software features that were suddenly unusable. When all was said and done, more than a decade of brand trust was flipped like an off switch.
Now Sonos is taking its first major steps to earn back trust and audiophile stature with a new brand strategy and the launch of two new speakers: the Sonos Play and Era 100 SL.
The Sonos Play is framed as a “callback” to the original Play:1 speaker that invented the smart wireless speaker category 13 years ago. The portable speaker, which retails for $299, features 24 hours of battery life in a durable, waterproof design, and a built-in power bank to charge your phone.
The second speaker—the Era 100 SL—is a new, cost-efficient entry point into the Sonos system. At $189 retail, it features wide stereo separation and balanced, natural bass while removing built-in microphones to focus on essential listening.
Tom Conrad, who took over as CEO in 2025 after the app debacle, says the company is no longer in the audio hardware arms race with companies like Bose, JBL, and Apple. Instead, he’s steering Sonos back to founder John McFarland’s original vision: creating a system for sound at home.
“I think we really just make one product and that product is called Sonos,” Conrad says. “Sonos is a sound system for the home, and any individual device that we make is just a way into the system or a way to deepen your engagement with the system. But the system is the product.”
Eras Tour
The Sonos comeback path hasn’t been smooth. After its app disaster, revenue dropped 16% in fiscal Q4 2024. Former CEO Patrick Spence stepped down in January 2025, and Conrad was named interim CEO (becoming permanent in July). In August 2024, the company laid off about 100 employees, then another 200 in February 2025, totaling about 18% of its workforce. Revenue began to stabilize by early 2026, but the company still showed a consecutive three-year decline in performance.
Conrad says the company was in “triage mode,” having cut R&D spending by 26%, and sales and marketing by 25%.
Part of the turnaround plan hinges on resetting the brand’s narrative, so in November 2025 Sonos named Colleen DeCourcy—former Snapchat chief creative officer and Wieden+Kennedy exec—CMO.
Conrad sees the story of Sonos as having three distinct eras. The first being its decade under founder McFarland, and what he describes as being “relentlessly focused on this idea of filling every home with music, with a system for sound.”
He says the second era under Spence was defined by “developing the muscle of building great new hardware” every year. He believes this era had an “unintended consequence” in that the company began to view itself as a seller of stand-alone devices like soundbars and headphones that competed directly with rivals like Sony and Bose.
Now, in the third era of Sonos, Conrad’s goal is to merge the best parts of the first two. “I’m bringing the focus of the company back to this idea that everything we do is grounded in enhancing the Sonos system, and that our new product introductions are kind of like grace notes on that symphony,” he says.
Brand over time
The brand challenges for Sonos are crystal clear, but newly minted CMO DeCourcy sees a silver lining. One of the lessons she learned while working with ad agency legend Dan Wieden was knowing how to answer the question, “If your product disappeared overnight, what would people be missing?”
The app breakdown in 2024 provided the answer. It quickly became apparent that millions of people were pissed off at the brand—but the upside is that they cared at all. “It was clear that there was a super deep connection to, fundamentally, not that speaker, but that system,” DeCourcy says.
A primary pillar of DeCourcy’s strategy involves activating the roughly 17 million existing households with Sonos through word-of-mouth and grassroots engagement rather than traditional ad campaigns. She plans to leverage the “Sonos Soundboard”—a group of influential music and film creators—to remind users of the brand’s creative roots through social and other content.
Details on executing the brand strategy are pretty thin, because this is all still very much in its infancy. Before any major brand work launches to the public, the priority is to sell the vision to the company’s 1,300 employees at its Santa Barbara, California, headquarters.
“The first thing that’s on my bucket list to get done is to internally rearticulate . . . and pull people along on this vision of why we are getting up and doing this every day,” DeCourcy says. “And then letting that spill out into the community.”
Now they just have to hope people are ready to turn up the volume and listen.