Sonos has a plan to make you love its speaker system again

After a rough couple of years, Sonos is on a mission to earn back trust. CEO Tom Conrad and CMO Colleen DeCourcy tell Fast Company how they’re making the Sonos system the star of the show.

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.”

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.

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