Approximately six months after the Montreal-based Valsoft Corporation acquired Above the Treeline, the parent company of the digital platform Edelweiss, 15% of the Edelweiss workforce has been laid off.
The company declined to disclose to PW how many employees were laid off and how many remain, but Edelweiss’s LinkedIn page notes that there are up to 50 employees, and its website lists 34 individuals on its current “team.” In a blog celebrating Edelweiss’s 20th anniversary in 2022, it was noted that there were “nearly 40 employees” at the time.
Among those laid off last week is Joe Foster, a longtime employee and former bookseller who began working for Edelweiss 15 years ago in customer support and worked his way up the ladder to director of education and special projects. Others laid off who have disclosed this information on their LinkedIn profiles include a senior software engineer, a data operations analyst, and a frontend software developer. Foster declined comment when PW reached out to him, while several others who were also laid off did not respond.
In an email sent to PW yesterday, Above the Treeline founder and CEO John Rubin wrote: “Above the Treeline is realigning the business around new strategic initiatives, which led to a 15% reduction in staff. We deeply value the contributions of our former staff members, who helped make us the company we are today. We are working hard to ensure that there will be minimal disruption for our users and clients and enable us to stay sustainable, to continue providing excellent products and excellent customer service, and to develop and grow in response to the needs of our industry.”
Edelweiss hosts 95% of U.S. frontlist titles and serves as a central workflow hub focusing on frontlist and backlist sales management, as well as providing analytics, workflow tools, and other related activities for publishers, booksellers, and librarians. It serves approximately 1,200 companies and there are 250,000 users.
