Cloud Managed APs And Switches Offer Ease, Visibility, And Scalability At Brookstone

Brookstone is a nationwide retailer specializing in innovative, unique, and useful consumer goods paired with an experiential shopping experience. The Brookstone team is dedicated to consistently improving the shopping experience for their customers, and they are able to focus their efforts on this high-level mission with the reliable, no-nonsense network that Meraki cloud managed wireless and switching solutions provide.

Don Gingras, Chief Architect of Security and Infrastructure for Brookstone, and his team turned to Meraki after encountering managerial challenges with their previous networking solution. Prior to Meraki, Brookstone relied on a third party vendor to install and manage their WiFi network. “We increasingly became more and more frustrated at the lack of visibility on our end. We only became aware of problems when the stores called us about it,” said Kyle Masters, the Help Desk Manager for Brookstone. 

Rock-solid WiFi coverage had become increasingly important to the Brookstone store experience, where associates and customers required access to detailed product information for the company’s thousands of products. Brookstone’s former WiFi network proved unable keep up with this increased need for reliability and traffic capacity. In the time it took a store associate to report a network issue, the customer’s shopping experience had already been compromised; that wasn’t good enough for Brookstone.