It’s been a volatile ride for outdoor cooking companies over the past five years. They’ve had high highs and low lows, and unfortunately, right now we’re in a low.

When tariffs were announced at the beginning of April, it had a huge impact on the gross profit line of all companies that were importing their products. For Ooni, the US is their biggest market, so they felt that impact while they were already seeing decreasing revenue.

Beyond financials, it’s been a transformational year for Ooni. They hired a new COO and their first non-founder CEO.

It hasn’t just been a story of making key hires though, the week before they announced a new CEO, they laid off 50 workers. We saw evidence of it, but it’s now been confirmed to a Scottish paper, The National.

Ultimately, for Ooni to thrive it’s critical that we align the structure of our team with our business strategy for the future.

While we have worked hard to avoid this situation, on 8 September we informed the team that we will be removing 50 roles globally. We appreciate this is a difficult time for our people and we’re committed to supporting our team during this period of change.

Ooni Statement to The National

The reduction of 50 people comes after Ooni reduced staff by 75 in the spring of 2024. They had been increasing staff prior to grow the business, but that didn’t translate to increased revenue due to market conditions.

There have been other outdoor cooking brands that have done layoffs this year to deal with the major margin hit from tariffs. With reduced gross profit, companies either have to dramatically increase revenue to cover fixed costs, or look to cutting operating expenses.

Revenue growth isn’t really on the table for the large majority of outdoor cooking companies due to market conditions, so that really only leaves cost cutting to preserve earnings. It wouldn’t be surprising to see other companies in the segment follow as we get further away from when tariffs were implemented.