Sonos director of global affairs and sustainability Deji Olukotun discusses innovation in home audio, the connection between sound and wellbeing, and the company's carbon neutral, net zero, and product longevity commitments.
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Sara Gutterman: I'm here with a director of global affairs and sustainability for Sonos. I am excited to have this conversation with you because there's a lot happening right now with respect to innovation in the audio, home audio and and speaker category. Can you talk a little bit about innovation in that space and some things that you're most excited about?
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Deji Olukotun: Some of our speakers have Dolby Atmos. So this is a very immersive listening experience. And that happens in home theater. So it feels like the sound is around you, but it's also expanding out into audio. So there's new types of recording that give you a more spatial sense of being in the room with the music. We're excited about that, just in terms of the size of things, there's some miniaturization happening compressing sound down and the way the sound is delivered.
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Deji Olukotun: And then, of course, we have a voice assistant called Sonos Voice Control. And you see that with other brands as well. And that means that you can be a little bit more free to roam around and and get the sound experiences you want. So a lot happening.
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Sara Gutterman: Can you talk a little bit about within kind of your portfolio and product line? Again, kind of what some of the the trends are with respect to what you're seeing? Consumers really want in their homes right now?
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Deji Olukotun: There's a lot of opportunity for us, as you mentioned. You know, we were founded back in 2002 and we invented the wireless audio market. So it's multi-room audio kind of listen seamlessly. And that means that we're kind of our portfolio reflects that, you know, where our customers want to experience sound. So that includes now what I mentioned before, you know, soundbars and home theater experiences.
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Deji Olukotun: We now have a couple of really great portable products, ones called the move, another one called The Rome. And you can take these outside on your patio. The roam is a portable one. You can take it to the beach or camping. Very durable. Waterproof. But we also do have the architectural speakers that you mentioned and that, you know, this is a category that we've been excited to see grow.
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Deji Olukotun: We allow those speakers to auto tune so they adjust to the size of the room and they make it sound great. You know, you want it in two rooms, you want in three rooms, or you just want to take it with you on the go. We make that possible.
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Sara Gutterman: Can you talk a little bit about that concept of how sound impacts a healthy home?
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Deji Olukotun: We supported about eight different organizations. We gave them donations, and the theme was music for Healing and Resilience. So we helped people perform bedside concerts in hospitals. And also we supported a program called Planted Symphony. So this is concerts that were accessible for people with disabilities. And they would go and kind of experience this in a botanic garden setting, and they hear this wonderful music.
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Deji Olukotun: We supported Smash Seattle, which is a nonprofit that provides health care to two musicians. So we've seen it in many ways. There's a direct connection between health and well-being, whether it's in your own home. Give it a try. Put on some music. It doesn't have to be exactly what you want. For me, one of the most fun things I like about some of those radio is it's curated by human beings.
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Deji Olukotun: So I've discovered so much new music just putting it on.
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Sara Gutterman: You also have an excellent back end corporate sustainability and ESG platform. So can you talk a little bit about the evolution of that sustainability strategy and some of your ESG goals and milestones?
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Deji Olukotun: We realized we could do better in some areas. So the first step was just to find out what was happening. And then we said performance targets in areas like energy efficiency in terms of auditing our supply chain, making sure that the workers who build our products were treated fairly. And sometimes we hit those targets and sometimes we miss them.
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Deji Olukotun: But the point was to be transparent. Luckily, we tend to make our targets. We try to be very thoughtful, and since then it's just expanded.
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Sara Gutterman: Can you tell us specifically how you are addressing net zero energy, water, carbon and waste?
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Deji Olukotun: We now have, you know, we have four steps to our plan. The first was just a map. We have to do that every year. The next one is to reduce. So rather than move right to something like carbon offsets, we said what can we do in-house to reduce our emissions. And we identified a couple of areas. The number one is energy efficiency.
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Deji Olukotun: How can we make our products more energy efficient. The next one is focusing on our supply chain. How can we get our suppliers to make some steps. And then there's things like, you know, getting when we actually ship our products to our customers, how can we be thoughtful and intentional around that? But then we're, you know, our goal is to be carbon neutral by 2030, relying on carbon offsets and then net zero by 2040, which will be using carbon removal technology as that becomes more available.
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Deji Olukotun: But I would just like to add that nine out of ten Sonos products ever made are still in use today. So that that commitment to longevity, I think, lines up really well with the the ethos of the green Builder community that we're we're not just building devices that you're supposed to use. And then, Chuck, they should be lasting a long time.
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Deji Olukotun: It should be providing you with good experiences for a long time. And we're very committed to that.
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Sara Gutterman: Do you currently have or have any plans for take back programs.
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Deji Olukotun: With some of our older products? We do make it possible for you to use what we call the upgrade, so we will take that back, you know, and this is something we're looking at very closely. You know, we have what we call our product lifecycle principles. And one of those principles is that we have a plan for the full lifecycle of the product from the moment we sell it.
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Deji Olukotun: So the moment you receive it, we have a plan to make sure that it's handled responsibly.
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Sara Gutterman: You mentioned a few of your ESG and sustainability goals and commitments, but what is the future look like for Sonos with respect to both innovation as well as ESG?
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Deji Olukotun: We're building that conversation, and from the moment products are being created, we've now adjusted. You know, Rome, for example, it would stay on until you essentially turned it off. We developed a solution for both Rome and move our two portable products that after a little while, we shut it down and we put it to sleep. When you're not using it, there's some very creative ideas there, but we can look at the whole portfolio of products and how are we addressing energy across that?
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Deji Olukotun: One thing I just wanted to mention is we did what something called a life cycle assessment. So this is a little bit different from the carbon side. But we took one of our products, the Sonos One, and we took it apart and analyzed backwards and forwards, not just to look at the impact on climate change and carbon emissions, but also things like water usage and toxicity.
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Deji Olukotun: And and that is informing our product decisions moving forward. We just completed it. We learned a lot. And then we want to continue that throughout your journey with a Sonos product to offer that premium sustainable experience.
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Sara Gutterman: So DG, how are you addressing social impact at Sonos.
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Deji Olukotun: Program that we're excited about in the sustainability space is called regenerative Sounds, and that is using sounds to promote biodiversity in conservation. There's a really exciting field called bio and which sensors are placed in forests in the ocean to listen for biodiversity and help scientists and engineers track, you know, whether forests are being protected, the health of those environments.
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Deji Olukotun: And it's not just knowing what species are there, it's actually active. Some of these sensors will send alerts to community groups to go in if they hear about deforestation or poaching, they can go in and address the problem. But it also is a beautiful mapping of of the biodiversity on our planet. So we're very proud of that program and we look forward to sharing more about it.