Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine Layoffs: The Company Cuts 50 Percent of Its Staff Weeks After She Bought It Back
About 30 employees were let go on Friday as the company drops its direct-to-consumer business and refocuses on film, television and Reese's Book Club - after a buyback valuing it at a fraction of the $900 million Candle Media paid in 2021.
Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine laid off approximately half its staff on Friday, weeks after the actress and French media group Mediawan bought the company back from Candle Media, TheWrap reported. The cuts affect roughly 30 employees, and the company declined to comment.
The restructuring is a change of shape, not just of size. Hello Sunshine will now focus primarily on film and television projects and the Reese's Book Club brand, after reportedly eliminating its direct-to-consumer team entirely - the division that turned fans into customers for lifestyle brands and merchandise, including The Home Edit, which Hello Sunshine acquired in 2022. The staff who remain work across film and television, the book club, social and digital marketing and partnerships, according to the reporting.
The layoffs land on top of one of the steepest repricings in recent entertainment business. Witherspoon teamed with Mediawan to buy Hello Sunshine back on October 13 for 'low to mid eight figures,' according to a person familiar with the terms - roughly $50 million at the high end of that range. Blackstone-backed Candle Media had acquired the company at a $900 million valuation in 2021, so the buyback represents a decline of roughly 94 percent at that estimate. 'We were just wrong,' a person close to Candle Media told TheWrap. 'This isn't a great deal in comparison to what we paid.'
What survives the cut is the part of the company audiences know best. Founded in 2016 and built around women-led stories, Hello Sunshine produced HBO's 'Big Little Lies' and Apple TV's 'The Morning Show,' and Reese's Book Club, launched in 2017, counts more than 6.2 million members and has become a pipeline for film and television projects. Friday's searches for the layoffs led the U.S. trending list read by this desk - a measure of how closely the company's next chapter will be watched.
