By Katie Deighton

Audio equipment company Sonos is on the hunt for a new global chief marketing officer to help repair its brand following the exit of Jordan Saxemard, who arrived last year just as the company was rolling out an app update that would prove disastrous.

Saxemard, who joined the company from Dyson and previously spent more than a decade in marketing at beauty company Coty, is departing a month after longtime Chief Executive Officer Patrick Spence stepped down following a disastrous software update that sent customers reeling.

The update was designed to improve the user experience and accelerate the company's pace of innovation. Users of its premium audio equipment instead found that its glitches were so bad they made the Sonos systems essentially useless.

Sonos since then has been in a scramble to placate existing and would-be customers, a challenge compounded by Spence's initial delay in apologizing.

Lindsay Whitworth, a Sonos vice president, will lead the company's marketing team as it searches for Saxemard's successor, Sonos said, declining to comment further on Saxemard's departure. The news was earlier reported by the Verge.

Saxemard, who couldn't immediately be reached for comment, arrived at Sonos in May and steered it through the launch of its first headphone product with a campaign starring musician and actor Suki Waterhouse. He also oversaw its first big holiday campaign in years, a quirky brand-building effort that centered on a video called "Elves of Sound."

Still, the Santa Barbara, Calif.-based company in November said that the botched app update cost it at least $100 million in revenue. The company's unit sales during the second half of 2024 fell 14% from a year earlier to about 2.7 million products sold, the fewest for that period since 2016.

Former Pandora executive and Sonos board member Tom Conrad was named interim CEO in January. Conrad last week told staff and investors that the company was laying off 200 employees, including 50 managers and executives, as part of an organizational restructuring and focus on cost savings.

"We will continue to carefully scrutinize the allocation of all dollars to ensure that they're being applied to the highest return opportunities, " Conrad told analysts on an earnings call. "The leaner and more effective we are as a company, the better we can capitalize on the opportunities in front of us."

Write to Katie Deighton at katie.deighton@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 10, 2025 18:46 ET (23:46 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.