Fifty employees representing about 18% of the workforce at Meow Wolf’s Denver location were laid off on Wednesday. Meow Wolf CEO Jose Tolosa sent a memo to staff Monday announcing the upcoming layoffs as part of a companywide effort to cut expenses by 10% and reduce the workforce in order to “right-size the business.”
On Thursday morning, Tolosa shared more details, including that 159 positions were cut in the four states Meow Wolf operates in. The company originally reported cutting 165 positions. In addition, the company plans to reduce the executive team’s compensation by 10%, close its corporate New York City office, scrap plans to open a Los Angeles office, and reduce funding for the Meow Wolf Foundation, a nonprofit arm that issues grants to creative organizations.
“When we opened our first exhibitions, there were no comparables for what we wanted to do. We were inventing an operating model from scratch,” Tolosa wrote in the memo. He went on to say that the past three years have taught the company about market demand and visitation patterns, and that they “overestimated the staffing in a number of functions.”
Invention and experimentation have always been at the core of Meow Wolf’s business, creating widespread success and intense growing pains.
The immersive art company was founded in New Mexico in 2008 by a group of artists — and self-described “technologists, writers, fabricators, painters, sculptors, musicians, rat gang leaders, and shoplifters” — with a shared interest in public art experiences. They built a local reputation on chaotic, anti-art-world antics and shows. Then, in 2015, Meow Wolf landed a $2.7 million donation from “Game of Thrones” creator George R. R. Martin to fund its first brick-and-mortar exhibit, a renovated bowling alley in Santa Fe that became “The House of Eternal Return.”
“You have to go with your gut,” Martin told the Los Angeles Times in an interview about his donation.
Since then, the company has expanded its maximalist, sci-fi-infused exhibitions to Las Vegas, Denver and Grapevine, Texas, with plans to open a Houston location later this year. They have grown from a few local founders to over 1,000 employees; from an art collective with a bent toward anarchy to a multimillion-dollar company with job titles that start with “chief executive.”
Growing pains
Meow Wolf opened both its Denver location, “Convergence Station,” and Las Vegas location, “Omega Mart,” in 2021. The company’s employee count more than doubled that year, from around 400 to nearly 1,000. Opening the new locations also meant major investments in local artist collaborations, including nearly $2.5 million spent decking out the Denver location.
Over the past three years, the company has opened a fourth location, planned a fifth, was recertified as a B Corp and launched the Meow Wolf Foundation.
But the company has also admitted to pursuing growth faster than its finances could keep up with, and those moves haven’t always gone over well with employees.
In 2020, with the Santa Fe location closed indefinitely due to the pandemic, and half of the company’s full-time workforce laid off, the remaining employees launched a union drive. They were voluntarily recognized soon after, but it took almost two years to secure a collective bargaining agreement. During that time, employees filed four unfair labor practice cases with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging the company was unfairly retaliating and refusing to bargain in good faith.
In 2022, one year after opening, employees at the Denver location launched their own union drive. Denver employees secured a collective bargaining agreement just seven months after their recognition, an anomaly amid a wave of labor organizing that tends to stall out during contract negotiations.
Among the union contract’s layoff provisions are two weeks of severance pay for every year that an employee has worked with Meow Wolf, payment of any unused time off and three months of COBRA benefits. Meow Wolf did not say how many employees laid off at the Denver location are represented by the union.
Employees at Meow Wolf in Las Vegas received union recognition in September of last year and are still working toward their first contract. Internal communications state that the company will lay off 54 employees represented by the union from that location. The company says it is “actively negotiating with the union” in Las Vegas, despite having no collective bargaining agreement in place. Employees at the Grapevine, Texas, location announced their intent to join the union in December 2023 but have not been formally recognized by the company yet.